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EMERSON IN CONCORD 



% a^emoit 



WRITTEN FOR THE "SOCIAL CIRCLE" IN 
CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS 



BY 



EDWARD WALDO EMERSON 



/^ 







^i'i 



K- 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1889 






Copyright, 1888, 
Br EDWARD WALDO EMERSON. 

All rights reserved. 



i^--^i^U 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge : 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. 



Not his the f caster's wine, 

Nor gold, nor land, nor power ; 
By want and pain God screeneth him 

Till his appointed hour. 
Go, speed the stars of thought 

On to their shining goals ; 
The sower scatters broad his seed. 

The wheat thou strew'st be souls. 






"o 

^ 



U 



I want to tell you something, Gentlemen. Eternity 
is very long. Opportunity is a very little portion of 
it, but worth the whole of it. If God gave me my 
choice of the whole planet or my little farm, I should 
certainly take my farm. 

Mb. Emeeson's Jovwxxl fob 1852. 



EMERSON IN CONCORD. 



**God, when He made the prophet, did not unmake the 
man." — Locke. 

It has been the good and time-honored practice 
of the Social Circle to preserve in its book as 
true a picture as may be of the life of each de- 
parted member. Thus the task fell to me of writ- 
ing for the chronicles of his village club the story 
of my father. 

His friend Mr. Cabot has written this story for 
the world. Everything was put into his hands, and 
he made good and true and loyal use of the trust. 

I write for my father's neighbors and near 
friends, though I include many who perhaps never 
saw him. His public life and works have been so 
well told and critically estimated by several good 
and friendly hands that I pass lightly over them, 
to show to those who care to see, more fully than 
could be done in Mr. Cabot's book consistently 
with its symmetry, the citizen and villager and 
householder, the friend and neighbor. And if I 
magnify, perhaps unduly, this aspect of my fa- 



2 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

tber, it is to show those whom his writings have 
helped or moved that his daily life was in accord 
with his teachings. 

I ask attention to the spirit even more than the 
matter of the extracts from his journals here 
given. These were chosen, but a hundred others 
would serve as well. It is now imputed as a short- 
coming that he did not do justice to the prevail- 
ing power of evil in the world. Fortunately he did 
not. It was not the message given to him. He 
could not. For that which made him live and 
serve and love and be loved was — a good Hope. 



In the ancient graveyard at Ipswich, in this State, 
lies buried Thomas Emerson, the first of the name 
in this country, who came among the very early 
settlers to Massachusetts Bay, probably from the 
neighborhood of Durham, in northeastern Eng- 
land. He is styled Thomas Emerson, Baker. His 
son, Joseph, took a step onward, and dispensed the 
bread of life to the settlers of Mendon, and took a 
Concord woman to wife, namely, Elizabeth Bulke- 
ley, daughter of the second and granddaughter of 
the first minister of this town. 

But their son, Edward, in spite of — perhaps 
because of — this priestly ancestry, relapsed to 
things of this world, and was for a time a " Mer- 
chant in Charlestown," though on his gravestone 



ANCESTORS. 3 

it was thought fitter to call him " sometime Dea- 
con of the church in Newbury." 

His son, Joseph, was the minister of Maiden ; 
strengthened the religious tendency of the family 
by marrying the daughter of the famous and eccen- 
tric Father Moody, of York (Agamenticus), Maine, 
and this couple, out of their numerous family, gave 
three young ministers to the Colony, of whom one 
of the youngest, William, came, as his diary re- 
cords, often on horseback to Concord to preach for 
Dr. Bliss, and when that zealous preacher died was 
chosen his successor. The young minister, only 
twenty-two years old, boarded with Madam Bliss, 
and soon won the affection of her daughter Phebe, 
bought the fields, pasture and hill at the bend 
of the Musketaquid, soon to become famous, and 
built the Manse, where his children were born 
in the next ten years, during which this earnest 
and patriotic man strove to do his duty to his par- 
ish and his country, and to strengthen the hearts 
and hands of his flock in days the gloom of which 
only the bright light of patriotism and trust in 
God could dispel. The first great crisis of the 
struggle came, and in his own town. At the alarm 
before daylight of the April morning, the young 
minister answered the call, and on the village com- 
mon did his best to uphold the courage of his 
townsfolk and parishioners and their trust in their 
good cause. The first volleys of the war were 



4 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

exchanged by the royal troops and provincials across 
the little bridge close by his house. Next year he 
joined the army at Ticonderoga as chaplain, and 
sickened and died at Rutland of camp-fever. He 
left several daughters and one son, William, who 
graduated at Plarvard College in 1789, and after- 
ward was settled as minister in the village of Har- 
vard, Mass., whither he brought Miss Ruth Haskins 
of Boston to be his wife. She was a lady of un- 
failing sweetness and .serenity, but also of courage 
and quiet strength, for which later she had need. 
In 1799 Mr. Emerson was urgently called from 
the quiet village among the Worcester County hills 
to take charge of the First Church in Boston. The 
society worshipped in the Old Brick Church in 
Cornhill, but in 1808 built a new one in Chauncy 
Place, and the parsonage was close by on Summer 
Street. Here, where Hovey's great store now 
stands, the Emersons lived among scattered man- 
sions surrounded by enclosed gardens, with vacant 
fields near by and a view of the harbor and ship- 
ping below, where 

" Twice a day the flowing sea 
Took Boston in its arms." 

Here all but one of their eight children were 
born. A little Phebe Ripley had been born in 
Harvard, and died the year after the family 
removed to the city. The seven little people that 
soon after claimed a birthright in Boston were : 



WILLIAM EMERSON OF BOSTON. 5 

John Clarke (born 1799), William (born 1801), 
Kalpb Waldo (born May 25, 1803), Edward 
Bliss (born 1805), Robert Bulkeley (born 1807), 
Charles Chauncy (born 1808), and Mary Caroline 
(born 1811). The eldest, John Clarke, died in 
childhood, as did also the little sister, a sad chance 
for her brothers. Bulkeley, though a pleasant boy, 
always remained childish in mind, and was there- 
fore dependent on his brothers, and a source of 
anxiety to them. The future history of William, 
Edward, and Charles will be mentioned in connec- 
tion with the later fortunes of their brother Waldo. 
But to return to the father of this family. Mr. 
Emerson was a cheerful and social man, of literary 
taste and skill. Besides writing a history of his 
church and making a collection of hymns, he was 
for years editor of the Monthly Anthology, a jour- 
nal in which the best men of letters of the day in 
Boston and Cambridge were interested, and which 
died with him. He was one of the founders of the 
Ministers' Library, afterwards merged in the Bos- 
ton Athenaeum. Both he and his father, William 
of Concord, valued and were esteemed in their day 
for eloquence. Both of these men seem to have 
been more interested in the central ethics of Chris- 
tianity than in the grim doctrines in which it had 
been enveloped, and in spite of the reaction to- 
wards Calvinism which Whitefield's eloquence and 
Edwards's fire had produced in many New Eng- 



6 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

land churches, did not emphasize Grace in their 
sermons, but appealed to the virtue and good sense 
of their people in the name of God : — 

" For faith and truth and mighty love, 
Which from the Godhead flow, 
Showed them the life in heaven above 
Springs from the Hfe below." ^ 

Of William Emerson of Boston his son says : 
" I think I observe in his writings ... a studied 
reserve on the subject of the nature and offices of 
Jesus. They had not made up their minds on it. 
It was a mystery to them, and they let it remain 
so." In view of the son's shrinking from all at- 
tempts to wall in the living truth with forms, his 
father's early wish and hope, while still in Harvard, 
of moving to Washington, and there founding a 
church without written expression of faith or cove- 
nant, is worthy of note. The humor and the affec- 
tionate and domestic expressions in my father's 
letters to his family and nearest friends often 
strangely recall the letters of his father and grand- 
father to those of their own household, which were 
familiar and often witty and playful to a degree 
remarkable in New England correspondence of 
those days, usually stiffened with formality and 
crowded with religious exhortation to the exclu- 
sion of aught else human. Whether his duties as 

^ Hymn by Mr. Emerson at the ordination of his successor, 
Rev. Chandler Robbins. 



THE DAME SCHOOL. 7 

preacher, pastor, editor and social citizen occupied 
Mr. Emerson's time so much that he could spare 
little to his children, or that Ralph was, as some 
children are, too much wrapped up in his childish 
reveries and experiments to notice early his elders 
except when required to do so, probably from both 
causes, the son had very little recollection of his 
father, although it appears in the family letters 
that Ralph's education had begun before he was 
three, at the "dame school," and that his father, 
when at home, required that William and Ralph, 
aged respectively five and three, should recite to 
him before breakfast a sentence of English gram- 
mar. Yet so dull was the younger that it stands 
recorded by his father, a week before his third 
birthday, that Ralph does not read very well. 

Poetry and Letters came hand in hand with Art 
to meet the little scholar, for in later years my 
father wrote to his friend. Rev. William Furness 
of Philadelphia, " My wife reads you and venerates 
you : then I brag that I went to school with him to 
Miss Nancy Dickson, and spelt out The House that 
Jack Built on his red handkerchief." 

Rev. William Emerson died in May, 1811, in 
middle life. Of this event my father only could 
remember, with a little boy's interest and pride, 
the stateliness of the funeral, at which the Ancient 
and Honorable Artillery escorted to the grave the 
body of their late chaplain. 



8 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

Mrs. Emerson found herself a widow, with a 
family of five little boys to be provided for, Wil- 
liam, the eldest, being but ten years old, and Ralph 
Waldo but eight. To a woman of her stamp pro- 
vision for her sons meant far more than mere food, 
raiment and shelter. Their souls first, their 
minds next, their bodies last : this was the order 
in which their claims presented themselves to the 
brave mother's mind. They must be pious and 
dutiful for their eternal welfare ; and then the tra- 
ditions of the family in all its branches required 
that they should be well read and instructed, and 
Harvard College was the gate through which many 
of their ancestors had gone to the storehouses of 
godly knowledge, which it was, to her mind, the 
highest function of a man to dispense to less fa- 
vored souls. Lastly, in those days the body had to 
look after itself very much : more reverently they 
put it. The Lord will provide. 

Her husband's friends and parishioners and the 
relatives did what they could to help the family of 
their dead pastor. The church with great gene- 
rosity continued the salary six months, and voted 
to pay five hundred dollars a year for seven years, 
80 the family were in no immediate distress. Mrs. 
Emerson stayed in the parsonage, and her hus- 
band's successor boarded with her, but did not live 
long ; and when Mr. Frothingham was settled as 
minister, Mrs. Emerson moved, first, I believe, to 



AUNT MARY. 9 

Atkinson Street and then to a house on Beacon 
Hill, and supported her family by taking boarders. 
The boys appear to have taken care of the vestry. 
They helped as they coiild in domestic matters, but 
they were expected to lose as little time as might 
be from reading and writing. There seems to have 
been little play. To their books they took as duck- 
lings to water. When some one spoke of their pro- 
gress, their aunt said, *' Sir, they were born to be 
educated." And it would be hard to overestimate 
the effect upon these young minds of this same 
proud, pious, eccentric, exacting, inspiring Aunt 
Mary Moody Emerson. She had been adopted in 
her infancy by relatives so poor that they lived in 
constant fear of the sheriff. She had been trained 
in hardship and sordid poverty, far from cultivated 
society, and under religious influences mainly Cal- 
vinistic, but she had managed to go through a 
wider range of books than most clergymen of her 
day, with a sure taste for superior writing and a 
judgment most critical. Though exacting in her 
standards of conduct, and often exasperatingly 
frank in her criticisms of her friends, her pride in 
and real affection for her young relations, and in- 
terests not only lofty but broad, commanded their 
loyal affection. Their mother was a serene and 
ennobling presence in the house ; their aunt a spur, 
or, better, a ferment in their young lives, and one 
that was never inert, for she made frequent visits 



10 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

to her relations, and, in whatever remote part of 
New England she might be boarding, her letters, 
by every opportunity of travelling minister or 
friend, incited her nephews to the search for wis- 
dom or pursuit of virtue, and required of them an 
account of their progTess. She guided their read- 
ing and made them think about it. She stimu- 
lated them by discussion, rallied them on their 
young vanities, and by this very correspondence 
trained them in reasoning and expression. Of her, 
her nephew wrote thus : " She gave high counsels. 
It was the privilege of certain boys to have this im- 
measurably high standard indicated to their child- 
hood, a blessing which nothing else in education 
could supply." " Lift your aims ; " " Always do 
what you are afraid to do ; " " Scorn trifles ; " — 
such were the maxims she gave her nephews, and 
which they made their own. 

The contrast between the lives of children then 
and now is almost painfully shown in the earnest 
letters from William Emerson and his wife, giving 
directions as to the discipline and instructions of 
little John Clarke, the oldest child, to some rela- 
tives in Waterford, Maine, with whom he was to 
pass a year. 

After the dame schools, my father went for a 
short time to the grammar school, taught by Mr. 
Lawson Lyon, a severe master, who wielded not the 
birch in vain. Among his schoolmates was John 
Marston, later a commodore in the U. S. Navv. 



LATIN SCHOOL DAYS. 11 

In 1813, Ralph, as he was called until he left col- 
lege, when he chose to be called Waldo, entered the 
Latin School, and received there most of his offi- 
cial schooling from Master Benjamin Gould until 
he entered college. Before he was ten years old he 
made two friends for life, William H. Furness, al- 
ready mentioned, and Samuel Bradford, — the one 
a distinguished Unitarian clergyman, the other 
an esteemed man of affairs. Both survived him. 
Kalph wrote verses, nonsensical and ambitious by 
turns, modelled on those of the English authors 
of the eighteenth century, usually correct in rhyme 
and metre, full of high-flown but conventional 
expressions. One of these, an epic entitled " The 
History of Fortus, a Chivalric Poem, in one vol- 
ume, complete ; with Notes, Critical and Explana- 
tory, by R. W. Emerson, LL. D.," ^ was written 

••^ When overwhelming multitudes of warriors, reinforced by two 
fire-breathing dragons, rush upon the wearied knight — 

" Fortus beholds — recovers breath, 
Then arms to do the work of death, 
Then like a Lion bounding o'er his foes 
Swift as the lightning he to combat goes. 



Six score and twenty thousand 'gan the fray, 
Six score alone survived that dreadful day. 
Ah ! hear the groans of those that bled 
In that sad plain o'erlaid with dead. 
Fortus, who would not quit the field. 
Till every foe was forced to yield, 
To tender pity now transformed his wrath. 
And from the bloody field pursued his path." 



12 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

when lie was ten years old, and " embellished with 
elegant Engravings," by his friend William Fur- 
ness. The notes, added three years later, are of 
an amusing severity. But chiefly the prowess of 
the United States frigates in the war then going 
on was the inspiring theme. He remembered 
well Captain Lawrence's sailing out with a raw 
crew and imperfect equipment, to accept the chal- 
lenge of battle sent in by the commander of the 
Shannon, and seeing the Boston people on the 
roofs watching anxiously that disastrous fight in 
the bay. He answered with his schoolmates the 
call for volunteers to do some shovelling on the 
works at Noddle's Island, but could not remember 
that any actual work was done by the boys. These 
old days are recalled in his letter to his ever-loyal 
friend. Dr. Furness, in 1838 : — 

" It is the pleasure of your affection and noble- 
ness to exaggerate always the merits of your friends. 
I know the trait of old, from Mr. Webb's school 
onwards, and so delight now as much as then in 
the smiles and commendations of my Maecenas. 
But how can you keep so good a nature from boy 
to man ? Nobody but you and my brother Edward 
would praise the verses to the immortal HuU,^ 
nor could be induced, though I read them never 
so often. And now the case is scarcely altered ; 
everybody thinks my things shocking but you and 

1 One of the youthful lyrics in houor of the navy. 



THE TRUANT. 13 

a few generous hearts who must be to me for 
Edward. I love to know you are there." 

The allusion to Mr. Webb's school, a writing 
school on the other sid« of the Common from the 
grammar school, to attend which Ralph was dis- 
missed for the last hour of the morning, recalls a 
fall from virtue which must be chronicled, since 
an English biographer complains that Mr. Emer- 
son, with his eyes open, " chose to lead a life of 
absolute conformity to the moral law." From this 
school — I have heard his own confession — he 
deliberately and continuously played truant, and 
enjoyed the stolen hours on the Common till such 
time as was needed for " sorrow, dogging sin," in 
the shape of bread-and-water confinement (prob- 
ably devoted to making verses), to run down its 
prey. 

Against the notion that his boyhood was abso- 
lutely empty of that on which most boys live, these 
imperfect notes, from a journal, must have their 
weight : — 

"Affectionate recollections of going into water 
after school in Charles Street, and the plafond view 
of rope-walks. What dangers turned us pale at 
a panic of North-Enders, South-Enders, Round- 
Pointers ! Sea-fencibles and the soldiery of 1813, 
and Noddle's Island. The pride of local knowl- 
edge of the Extinguisher, Dispatch and Cataract 
fire-engines. Armories and immense procession of 



14 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

boys in uniform at the Washington Benevolent 
Association. 

• ••••■•• 

'* In old Boston a feature not to be forgotten was 
John Wilson, the Town-crier, who rang his bell at 
each street corner : ' Lost ! a child strayed this 
morning from 49 Marlboro' Street ; four years old ; 
had on a checked apron,' etc. ' Auction ! Battery- 
march Square,' etc. He cried so loud that you 
could not hear what he said if you stood near." 

But, boy or man, he found that social and stir- 
ring life was only good for him, diluted with nine 
parts of solitude, wherein he might muse upon and 
interpret the scene. 

" I remember when a child in the pew on Sun- 
days amusing myself with saying over common 
words as ' black,' ' white,' ' board,' etc., twenty or 
thirty times, until the words lost all meaning and 
fixedness, and I began to doubt which was the 
right name for the thing, when I saw that neither 
had any natural relation, but were all arbitrary. 
It was a child's first lesson in Idealism." Yet if 
the minister's voice lulled him into a pleasing mood 
for these speculations, in those days such dreams 
would be rudely broken by a sound, sudden and 
fearful. I have heard him say, " I can't think 
that nowadays those sounds are heard in church, 
or in any such degree, that were continual in my 
childhood ; I think considered as part of the service 



BOYISH LOVE OF RHETORIC. 16 

— a ' service of the Lord with horns in the Sanc- 
tuary.' The old school of Boston citizens whom I 
remember had great vigor, great noisy bodies ; 1 
think a certain sternutatory vigor, the like whereof 
I have not heard again. When Major B. or old 
Mr. T. H. took out their pocket handkerchiefs at 
church it was plain that they meant business ; they 
would snort and roar through their noses like the 
lowing of an ox and make all ring again. Ah ! it 
takes a North-En der to do that ! " 

Study, all but mathematics, in which he was 
always dull, was no hardship to him, and while 
there was some play, the main recreation of these 
brothers seems to have been reading of history, the 
little fiction they could get at, and always poetry, 
but especially did they delight in fine rhetoric and 
eloquent passages. And in barns or garrets, or in 
Concord woods when visiting their grandmother, 
they forgot their surroundings, or turned them in 
their young imagination into Forum, battlefield or 
mountain-top. 

1856. 
Journal. " I have often observed the priority of 
music to thought in young writers, and last night 
remember what fools a few sounding sentences 
made of me and my mates at Cambridge, as in 
Lee's and John Everett's orations. How long we 
lived on Licoo, on Moore's * Go where Glory waits 
thee ' and Lalla Rookh and ' When shall the swan, 



16 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

his death-note singing.' I still remember a sen- 
tence in Carter Lee's oration : ' And there was a 
band of heroes, and round their mountain was a 
wreath of light, and, in the midst, on the moun- 
tain-top, stood Liberty feeding her eagle.' " 

Towards the end of the year 1814 the family 
began to feel severely the pinch of poverty, and it 
is said that they even fell short of bread. In- 
stantly the good Dr.. Ezra Hipley, who interpreted 
most generously his relation to the descendants of 
his wife, came to their aid and carried his step- 
son's widow and her boys to his fireside in Con- 
cord until the cold season of famine should pass by. 
Perhaps December of 1814 was the time, for a let- 
ter from Edward to William, who was then a Fresh- 
man in college, shows the brothers in the Concord 
Schools : — 

" Ralph and I and Charles go to Mr. Patten's 
school. Charles spelt with the first class. We 
all say that we like Mr. Patten better every day. 
I wish very much that you would come here," etc. 

There are a few records of this school life. 

" When I was a boy and quarrelled with Elisha 
Jones and Frank Barrett, Dr. Ripley sent for them 
one evening to come to the house and there made us 
shake hands. Aunt Mary asked me, ' Well, what 
did you say to them?' 'I did not say anything.' 
' Fie on you ! You should have talked about your 
thumbs or your toes only to say something.' " 



SCHOOL DAYS IN CONCORD. 17 

A gentleman, who in his youth was clerk in 
Deacon White's store, tells us that he used to love 
to hear the small Ralph declaim, and would cap- 
ture him when he came on an errand and set him, 
nothing loath, on a sugar barrel whence he would 
entertain his earliest Concord audience, the chance 
frequenters of the grocery, with recitations of po- 
etry, very likely Campbell's Glenara or the Kos- 
ciusko passage, or statelier verses from Milton. 

But in spite of spelling and arithmetic in the 
public school, and long sermons in the church, and 
family worship, and catechising at the Manse con- 
ducted by the good Doctor, and the piling of wood 
in the yard or bringing it in by armfuls to feed the 
hospitable fires, the Muses were there, as every- 
where. Ralph had sung the victories of the Stars 
and Stripes on the waters in the war, and had 
within the year borne an active part in it, at least 
to the extent of volunteering with his school-mates 
to handle a shovel for an hour or two on the 
works at Noddle's Island, and now that (as he 
hinted in his speech in his old age to the Latin 
School at their celebration) Great Britain, hearing 
of that action, had thought it best to make peace, 
when the great news was brought to Concord and 
the national joy found expression in ringing of the 
church bell and illumination of the Court House 
steeple, that humble blink of whale-oil or tallow 
seen by him half a mile away across the meadows 



18 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

at the Manse " appeared very brilliant," he tells 
William in his letter, and he breaks forth into 
song : — 

" Fair Peace triumphant blooms on golden wings, 
And War no more of all his victory sings." 

Opposite the Manse was a hill giving a wide 
prospect westward over the undulating landscape 
of forest and clearing to Monadnoc and the lower 
mountains on the New Hampshire boundary, and, 
close by, of the round hill Nashawtuc (once the 
seat of the Sagamore Tahattawan, last prince of 
the Stone-age), at the base of which the swifter 
Assabet joins the Musketaquid, and thence united 
they lazily sweep northwards behind the Manse 
to the Great Meadows to the east. Above these 
meadows and behind the hill on low bluffs were 
old Indian cornfields, grown up to oak and birch 
wood, and known as Csesar's Woods and Peter's 
Field, because of a family of negro squatters near 
by. But here the brothers Ralph, Edward and 
Charles found values unknown to the owners. 

" They took this valley for their toy, 
They played with it in every mood ; 
A cell for prayer, a hall for joy, — 
They treated nature as they would. 

" They colored the horizon round ; 
Stars flamed or faded as they bade, 
All echoes hearkened for their sound. 
They made the woodlands glad or mad. " ^ 

^ Dirge in the Poems. 



THE BROTHERS. 19 

There they wandered and dreamed, talked of 
their heroes, and recited to each other or to the 
birch -trees the resounding verses that delighted 
them. Oak and aspen, brake and golden-rod, held 
their identity and values very loosely. 

" For in those lonely grounds the sun 
Shines not as on the town, 
In nearer arcs his journeys run, 
And nearer stoops the moon. 

" There in a moment I have seen 
The buried past arise ; 
The fields of Thessaly grew green, 
Old gods forsook the skies. 

" I cannot publish in my rhyme 

What pranks the greenwood played ; 
It was the Carnival of Time 
And ages went or stayed.'* ^ 

So in these days of his youth " these poor fields " 
bound him unconsciously with ties which drew him 
back before many years to live and dream and 
prophesy and die in them. 

Better days came to the country, and the family 
left the sheltering ancestral roof and returned to 
Boston in the summer of 1815 to live on Beacon 
Hill, the good Dr. Ripley sending them a Concord 
cow, which Ralph daily drove to pasture down that 
now aristocratic declivity. 

The history of the family during the next ten 

^ Peteb's Field in the Appendix to Poems (Riverside Edition^. 



20 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

years may be thus stated. Eacli son, except Bulke- 
ley, was fitted for college, doing liis full share of 
the work himself, and pursuing general culture, 
eagerly seizing all means (books solid or imagina- 
tive, sermons, addresses, debates) that fell in their 
way meanwhile for recreation. One or another of 
them was always acting as usher, teaching and 
studying at once in the boys' school at Waltham of 
their ever friendly and helpful uncle, Eev. Samuel 
Ripley. They lived frugally among the frugal, 
applied for and kept by diligence any scholarships 
that were to be had, earned money by serving in 
Commons, by helping their more prosperous and 
less diligent fellow-students, by teaching during 
vacations, and by winning an occasional prize for a 
dissertation, declamation, or poem. Madam Emer- 
son never wanted friends who gladly helped her 
boys, but such help was almost always received as 
a loan to be strictly repaid in time. Each son felt 
his duty to help his mother and the younger ones, 
but of course the burden of care and responsibility 
weighed hea\dest on the shoulders of William, the 
eldest, who entered college when he was only thir- 
teen years old, and left its stamp on him through 
all his days, which, though prolonged past middle 
life, were undoubtedly shortened and deprived of 
their full share of happiness and vigor by the he- 
roic burdens assumed and sacrifices made by him 
in youth and early manhood for his family. 



HIS MOTHER. 21 

To show the Spartan counsels that braced these 
boys, I give extracts from the letters of his mother 
and Aunt Mary to William when he had just en- 
tered college, and had evidently given an account 
of his new room in the severe, barrack-like dormi- 
tories of those days. 

" My dear Son, — You did right to give me 
so early a proof of your a;ffection as to write me 
the first week of your College life. Everything 
respecting you is doubtless interesting to me, but 
your domestic arrangements the least of anything, 
as these make no part of the man or the character 
any further than he learns humility from his de- 
pendence on such trifles as convenient accommo- 
dations for his happiness. You, I trust, will rise 
superior to these little things, for though small in- 
deed, they consume much time that might be ap- 
propriated to better purpose and far nobler pur- 
suits. What most excites my solicitude is your 
moral improvement and your progress in virtue. 
. . . Let your whole life reflect honor on the name 
you bear. ■. . . Should Paul plant and A polios 
water, it is God alone who can give the increase." 

His Aunt Mary said : — 

" Some lady observed that you felt your depen- 
dent situation too much. Be humble and modest, 
but never like dependence. . . . God's bounty is 
infinite. Be generous and great and you will con- 
fer benefits on society, not receive them, through 
life." 



22 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

Modern Harvard even thougli delivered from the 
Greek fetich, and with freest election of studies, 
may be a more comfortable place for the study of 
the humanities. Is it a better school of character ? 

The mother could afford to give brave counsel, 
for the sons knew her tenderness, and she, in her 
letters to them, never complained of her own cir- 
cumstances, seldom mentioned them, was constantly 
admonishing them to do well, but affectionately 
and naturally. She quotes Dr. Johnson's New 
Year's prayer to William in her letter of January 
1, 1816, and ends her letter thus : — 

" Wishing you all the happiness consistent with 
a life of progressive knowledge, piety, and heav- 
enly wisdom, I remain, 

" Your truly affectionate friend and mother, 

"KuTH Emerson." 

Of the Waltham teaching period I find in my 
father's journal for 1830, this mention, probably 
autobiographic. 

" jRobin went to the house of his uncle, who was 
a clergyman, to assist him in the care of his pri- 
vate scholars. The boys were nearly or quite as 
old as he, and they played together on the ice and 
in the field. One day the uncle was gone all day 
and the lady with whom they boarded called on 
Robin to say grace at dinner. Robin was at his 
wit's end, he laughed, he looked grave, he said 
something, — nobody knew what, — and then 



ENTERS COLLEGE. 23 

laughed again, as if to indemnify himself with the 
boys for assuming one moment the cant of a man. 
And 3^et at home perhaps Eobin had often said 
grace at dinner." 

Ralph entered college at the age of fourteen in 
1817. He was President's Freshman, and so, in 
return for carrying official messages from the Rev. 
John T. Kirkland to students and officers of the 
college, had a room in the old President's house, 
still standing in Harvard Square. 

When William was absent teaching, Ralph, who 
seems to have had thoroughly in youth the disease 
mothers complain of as the " silly stage," used to 
delight in sending to the oldest brother, naturally 
anxious for the sobriety or studiousness of the 
younger boys, letters full of scraps of verse, to 
which W^illiam was never addicted, and these of a 
doggerel type. 

In a letter to William, at Waltham, retailing the 
college news, extolling Everett's oratory, telling of 
the books he reads, he says, — 

" I shall chum next year with Dorr, and he 
appears to be perfectly disposed to study hard. 
But to tell the truth, I do not think it necessary to 
understand Mathematicks and Greek thoroughly 
to be a good, useful or even great man. Aunt 
Mary would certainly tell you so, and I think you 
yourself believe it, if you did not think it a dan- 
gerous doctrine to tell a Freshman. But do not be 



24 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

afraid, for I do mean to study them, though not 
with equal interest to other studies." 

During the winter vacation Waldo succeeded 
William in Mr. Ripley's school. The letters grow 
more manly, and begin to show solicitude to do 
his share to make life easier for their mother. In 
his Sophomore year he availed himself of the op- 
portunity given to the poorer students of offsetting 
part of the price of their board by waiting on the 
Juniors' table at Commons. That year occurred the 
famous Rebellion, which broke out in Commons 
Hall. In it he took no active part, and returned 
with his class to Cambridge in February, 1819. 
Later he was admitted to the Conventicle and 
Pythologian Clubs, convivio-literary bands, and of 
one of them he tells William that his membership 
means that he is " one of the fifteen smartest fel- 
lows." The festivities and debates of these gather- 
ings he has himself chronicled in the life of his 
classmate, John M. Cheney, written for the Social 
Circle. To show that the iron rule of life had 
occasional relaxation, I quote from his journal : — 

" I drank a good deal of wine (for me) with the 
wish to raise my spirits to the pitch of good fellow- 
ship, but wine produced its old effect, I grew graver 
with every glass." 

Yet while he could write an occasional Bacchic 
song for his mates, he quotes the above passage 
later as characteristic of " My doom to be solitary," 



COLLEGE DAYS. 25 

and neither in horse-play nor social gatherings did 
he find his natural recreation, but in omnivorous 
reading outside the curriculum, and constant writ- 
ing. Indeed, the expenses to meet which these 
boys wanted money seem to have been oil, paper 
and quills. They read good standard works, con- 
stantly practised writing journals, essays, poems 
and meditations as a daily amusement. Edward 
when at Andover at school, and only eleven years 
old, wrote fairly good letters in Latin to his oldest 
brother at the latter's request. Ralph and Edward 
read French books together w^hen respectively only 
thirteen and eleven. Their mother sent them 
books like Flavel's " How to Keep the Heart " and 
" Mason on Self -Knowledge." Ealph writes to 
William, April, 1819 : — 

" If you could see me now by the benefit of 
Merlin's mirror or other assistance, you would pity 
me. The hour is soon after 5 o'clock A. M., at 
which time, by the way, I get up every morning 
and sometimes at half-past four. Well, at this 
hour, in Hollis, standing at your old desk twisting 
and turning, endeavoring to collect thoughts or in- 
telligence enough to fill the dreary blank of a page 
and a third more. Add to my relative situation 
my chum asleep very near me. 

" Saturday 24th I am going to Boston to see 
Aunt Mary, who has returned from her Concord 
and Waltham visits. Our next theme is Avarice. 



26 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

Mr. Willard always gives us these trite and sim- 
ple subjects contained in one word. Mr. Gilman 
gives the Juniors a motto and generally a very 
good one with more uncommon subjects." 

If the Emersons could not get enough writing 
to do in the ordinary course of work they some- 
times took contracts outside. An anecdote told me 
of Edward by his classmate shows how the brothers 
eked out their finances. 

Mr. John C. Park says : — 

" I and some others used to make a little money 
by writing themes for those who found it harder. 
The way we used to do w^as to write out any ideas 
which occurred to us bearing on the subject, and 
then, having cut the paper into scraps, to issue it 
to the various buyers to use in their themes, con- 
densing and improving all the best of it for our 
own. Well, one morning, , your Uncle Ed- 
ward's chum, came out and stood on Hollis steps 
and called out, ' Look here, fellows ! I 've got some- 
thing to show you. I want you to listen to this 
and tell me if it 's worth fifty cents,' and proceeded 
to read what Emerson had written for him. You 
see he had come down in his style to make it possi- 
ble for the professor to believe that the theme could 

have emanated from , and in his endeavors 

to do so had written so humbly that himseK 

doubted if it were worth half a dollar." 

Where the money went that the boys managed 



CLASS POET. 27 

to earn is illustrated by the story my father told 
me, that he proudly sent home the five dollars 
which he won at the Boylston prize declamation, 
but on his next visit found that William, the care- 
worn head of the family, then eighteen years old, 
had paid the baker with it. Ralph had hoped his 
mother would buy a new shawl. He took the same 
year the second prize for a Dissertation on " the 
Present State of Ethical Philosophy." 

He graduated in 1821, hardly more than in the 
upper half of his class, and had a part, " The 
Character of John Knox," in a Conference on sev- 
eral historical characters. He was chosen Class 
Poet, after seven others had refused the office ; 
Robert Barnwell, a brilliant Southerner, being the 
Orator. One cannot find the germ of the Wood- 
notes or Monadnoc in this poem, conventional in 
imagery and expression and regular in metre. At 
different times he chummed with two classmates, 
and in the senior year roomed with Edward, then 
a Freshman. The claims of the scholar's tv/o hand- 
maids, Society and Solitude, he, through all his life, 
was weighing, but always favored the latter. In 
1859 he thus decides ; and, in doing so, gives this 
summary of his college course : — 

" ' In the morning, — solitude,' said Pythagoras. 
By all means give the youth solitude that Nature 
may speak to his imagination as it does never in 
company, and for the like reason give him a cham- 



28 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

ber alone, and that was the best thing I found in 
College." 

Now he was free to work to help the family and 
a place was ready for him, for William having 
worked hard and denied himself that every penny 
should come home, teaching a High School in 
Kennebunk, had returned and established a pri- 
vate school for the young ladies of Boston more 
than a year before, and offered his brother the 
place of assistant. It is hard now to imagine two 
young men of eighteen and twenty years (the age 
of Freshmen and Juniors now) opening a " finishing 
school " for the first young ladies of the capital ; 
but such was the venture, and the dignity, deco- 
rum and scholarly thoroughness of William had 
already made the school an assured success. The 
school was kept in Mrs. Emerson's house. 

On this undertaking, Edward irreverently com- 
ments to William : — 

" I was glad to hear that you had determined to 
commence school in Boston and that you had such 
* respectable ' scholars, and I think, now people 
are so fond of novelty, that your external appear- 
ance will add much to your reputation, for never 
did such a Narcissus appear in the character of a 
school-master before ; therefore I hope the school 
will be full before people have time to find out 
how little you know." 

Soon after this the family moved to Canterbury, 



" GOOD-BYE, PROUD WORLDS 29 

a part of Roxbury, and lived in a little house in a 
lane (now Walnut Avenue near Blue Hill Avenue) 
owned by a neighboring farmer, Mr. Stedman 
"Williams. 

This thickly built part of Boston was then a 
picturesque wilderness of savin, barberry bush, 
catbrier, sumach and rugged masses of pudding 
stone ; and here Ralph, shaking off academic har- 
ness and the awkwardness and formality of the 
usher in a girls' school, wrote 

" Good-bye, proud "World, I 'm going home," 

within three miles of the State House. He was 
both annoyed and amused at often seeing his boy- 
ish verses, which he hardly tolerated in the later 
editions of his poems, asserted to have been a shak- 
ing off of the dust of his feet against an unappre- 
ciative city when he left his profession and came 
to Concord. 

" In Roxbury in 1825 I read Cotton's transla- 
tion of Montaigne. It seemed to me as if I had 
written the book myself in some former life, so 
sincerely it spoke my thought and experience. No 
book before or since was ever so much to me as 
that." 

Though he told his classmate Hill and his Aunt 
Mary in his letters that he did not enjoy Nature so 
much as he had hoped to, yet it was evidently a 
delightful relief to the youth, — hampered by his 



80 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

shyness in Ms rather uncongenial occupation, which 
he called " lifting the truncheon against the fair- 
haired daughters of this raw city," though the task, 
it is safe to say, was no worse than bitter-sweet, — 
to rush out to blossoms and boughs and be free 
to write the thoughts of which, he said, his brain 
must yield its burden or die. 

The school was continued, but when Ralph was 
well established in it, William, inspired no doubt 
to the venture by the experience of Edward 
Everett and George Bancroft, went to Germany 
to study for the ministry at Gottingen. Here he 
faithfully worked for nearly two years, delighted 
with the scholarly opportunities and the living on 
almost nothing-a-year, then possible, but disgusted 
with the idleness and dissipation of the students. 
Ralph carried on the school for more than a year, 
but it was a sore trial for a bashful youth, unused 
even to sisters, to secure attention to studies (espe- 
cially mathematics for which he had no gift) and 
observance of due discipline from the fashionable 
young ladies of Boston, many of them older than 
himself. They used to ask him on Election Day 
to give them a holiday while he voted, knowing 
him to be a minor. They liked to make him blush. 
When in 1865 he was asked by many of these 
ladies, his old scholars, to meet them, he expressed 
to them his regret at his short-comings thus : — 

" My teaching was partial and external. I was 



THE SCHOOL-MASTER. 31 

at the very time already writing in my chamber 
my first thoughts on morals and the beautiful laws 
of compensation and of individual genius, which 
to observe and illustrate have given sweetness to 
many years of my life. ... I am afraid that no 
hint of this ever came into the school." 

Miss Hannah Stevenson, one of these ladies, 
told me that neither the parents nor pupils con- 
sidered the school a failure. She says that they 
found out that to praise Dugald Stewart's Phi- 
losophy, which he had lately read, and which was 
one of the few metaphysical works he liked, was 
a way to please him. 

Meantime he was, as opportunity offered, prepar- 
ing, like William, to assume the hereditary gown, 
the family circumstances had eased a little, and 
free of debts he joyfully closed his school, Febru- 
ary 8, 1825, and that evening records that he goes 
to Cambridge next day to study divinity in the 
Middle Class. 

In a letter to his Aunt Mary of self-examination 
before he enters the study for the ministry, speak- 
ing of his slight success as school-master, but honest 
work, he calls himself '' ever the Dupe of Hope." 

He took a room in Divinity Hall for its cheap- 
ness, — a ground-floor apartment with northeast 
exposure, - — and within a month, sick and with 
bad eyes, was obliged to go to his Uncle Ladd's 
in Newton to recuperate his strength on the farm. 



32 



EMERSON IN CONCORD. 



Working here in the field with a laborer they fell 
a-talking and the man, a Methodist, said that men 
are always praying, and that all prayers are an- 
swered. This statement struck Waldo, and upon 
this theme he wrote his first sermon, which he 
preached that summer in Waltham in the pulpit 
of his Uncle Ripley. Next day in the stage-coach 
a farmer said to him, " Young man, you '11 never 
preach a better sermon than that." 

The autumn came and with health partly restored 
he went to Chelmsford to teach the Academy. His 
brother Bulkeley was there on a farm. Among 
his pupils was a boy of whom he said later : " He 
was a philosopher whose conversation made all the 
social comfort I had." This boy, Benjamin Peter 
Hunt, later of Philadelphia, in a letter written in 
1860 says : — 

" It is now thirty-five years since you began your 
teachings to me, and, with the exception of those 
of the great, rough, honest and impartial world, I 
think they have been the best which I ever received 
from any man whom I have personally known. 1 
hope I shall continue to receive similar teachings 
thankfully as at present for many years to come." 

Another pupil, Mr. Josiah G. Abbott, now of 
Boston, said that no punishment for any misbe- 
havior could have been more deeply felt than hear- 
ing the tone in which Mr. Emerson spoke of it as 
"Sad! sad!" 



THE DIVINITY STUDENT. 33 

But at Chelmsford rheumatism and bad eyes 
pursued him, and after three months he had to 
resign his charge there. and go once more to Rox- 
bury, this time to assume the successful school of 
his younger brother Edward, whose heroic labors 
in college and after had so far undermined his 
strength that he had been advised to take a voy- 
age to the Mediterranean. Waldo, as he now pre- 
ferred to be called, taught, though he was not well, 
and in spring took a school in Cambridge (his 
last venture of this kind) in order to be where he 
might get what benefit his time allowed from the 
Divinity School, and in October of this year, 1826, 
having studied in some sort for three years, he was 
"approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Associ- 
ation of Ministers. He once said that if they had 
examined him it would have been doubtful if they 
would have allowed him to preach. At this time 
Edward writes : " Mother has already gone to Con- 
cord. She was happy in her prospects, happy in 
our's, happy in Waldo's (though he was quite sick 
while here), and as sure as she always is of divine 
protection and interposition." 

But now, with his profession opening before him, 
to weak eyes and lame hip wq,s added a threaten- 
ing stricture of the right chest, aching after each 
attempt to preach, and he was ordered by his doc- 
tor to go South and stay till his condition mended. 

The generous uncle, Rev. Samuel Ripley, ad- 



34 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

vanced money and gave letters of credit for this 
trip, and Dr. Ripley invited Madam Emerson to 
the Manse, Edward writes to William : — 

"November 27 y 1826. 

"Waldo sailed in the new ship Clematis for 
Charleston, S. C. He will return, we think, in 
April and may either be a renewed and robust 
man or a confirmed invalid. . . . He has preached 
at Waltham and in the First Church [his father's, 
in Chauncy Place] to acceptance, and to the admi- 
ration of the intellectual part of his auditors." 

And the next month he says : — 

" Boston, December 26. 

" Would you hear a high compliment paid to 
your brother's preaching? I heard Dr. Channing 
preach a sermon which I considered as too elevated 
and sublime to be an object of human praise, and 
in the same evening heard Dr. Gamaliel Bradford 
observe that there was not therein one half so 
much thought as in Waldo's discourse." 

He got no better in Charleston, and so went on 
to St. Augustine, where he chafed in exile, wrote 
some sermons and rather despondent verses, marked 
with natural disfavor the idleness and dissipation 
of the populace, and had his first real view of 
Slavery. But he had an oasis in this desert ; he 



VISIT TO THE SOUTH. 35 

met and formed a friendship with Achille Murat, 
the son of Napoleon's Murat, Byron's fine lines 
upon whom I have so often heard him recite with 
pleasure. 

" And thou too, of the snowwhite phime ! 
Whose realm refused thee even a tomb ; 
Better hadst thou still been leading 
France o'er hosts of hirelings bleeding 
Than sold thyself to death and shame 
For a meanly royal name : 

There, where death's brief pang was quickest, 
And the battle's wreck lay thickest 
Strewed beneath the advancing banner 
Of the eagle's burning crest — 
(There with thunder-clouds to fan her, 
Who could then her wing arrest — 
Victory beaming from her breast ?) 
While the broken line enlarging, 
Fell, or fled along the plain ; 
There be sure Murat was charging I 
There he ne'er shall charge again ! '* 

The son took Mr. Emerson to his inland estate, 
a two days' ride, and later they sailed together for 
Charleston, and the bad voyage of nine days was 
made happy by this attractive and superior com- 
panion. 

The invalid worked cautiously northward, preach- 
ing in Charleston, Washington, Philadelphia and 
New York ; but though he had gained weight and 
strength, the "villain stricture" still remained, 



36 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

and when he came to Concord in June to see his 
mother he was almost ready to abandon his pro- 
fession, despairing of ever being able to speak in 
public, and finding that two sermons a day taxed 
his voice alarmingly. Still he did not lose cour- 
age, preached when he could, and, taking a far- 
sighted view of the situation, was more prudent 
than his brothers could have been, engaged a bet- 
ter room in Divinity Hall to study as he could, and 
says in his letters that he sought out good laughers 
and gossip. 

During the latter half of 1827 he supplied the 
Northampton pulpit for three Sundays and twice 
spoke in his father's church. He also preached 
for his kinsman Dr. Dewey in New Bedford. 

In December, during a visit to Concord, New 
Hampshire, — " New Concord "as he must have 
heard it called somewhat intolerantly in his ances- 
tral town, — he met Ellen Louisa Tucker, and went 
away not unaffected by her fine character and deli- 
cate beauty. She was the daughter of Beza Tucker, 
a Boston merchant who had died a few years ear- 
lier, and her mother had married Mr. W. A. Kent 
of Concord, New Hampshire. 

All through the next j^ear he lived at Divinity 
Hall, except when he visited the Manse, trying to 
regain his strength, studying, reading Hume and 
Coleridge, and strongly interested in the Scotch 
and English reviews in which the papers of a 



ELLEN TUCKER. 37 

Thomas Carlyle appeared, and in these years he 
had become attracted to the writings of Emmanuel 
Swedenborg chiefly by means of his disciple Mr. 
Samson Reed, a Boston apothecary, whose book on 
the Growth of the Mind had two years earlier 
given him great pleasure. 

Until he could feel assurance of life and work- 
ing power he avoided engagements to preach as a 
candidate, and refused three such opportunities. 
During a visit of Dr. Ripley's to Washington he 
supplied the Concord pulpit. 

Again in December he thought he could trust 
himself, after a year's absence, in the dangerous 
neighborhood, and went to preach in Concord, New 
Hampshire, but before the New Year came in he 
was engaged to Ellen Tucker. When he began 
to speak of his prospects he records that she said, 
" I do not wish to hear of your prospects." 

But within a month when the prospect was hap- 
piest, and even while he was receiving the call of 
the Second Church in Boston (the old church of 
Cotton Mather) to come as the associate pastor 
with the Rev. Henry Ware, Ellen Tucker showed 
alarming signs of the development of consumption. 
Dr. James Jackson gave hope however that she 
might be better, and my father entered on his new 
duty in the Hanover Street Church. 

In his first sermon he gave his criticism upon 
ordinary preaching, freely stating his own beliefs, 



38 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

and warned his people that he should insist on 
elbow-room in preaching. His relations with Mr. 
Ware were the best throughout. Soon the senior 
pastor's health required that he should go abroad, 
and the young minister assumed the whole duty. 
We have from many sources witness borne that his 
faith and his earnestness as well as his eloquence, 
which, as a boy, he had hoped to " put on as a 
robe," moved his people, especially the young. 
Those of more conservative and less imaginative 
temperament were not altogether pleased. 

With regard to his success in the more perfunc- 
tory social duties of a parish minister there is more 
room for doubt. 

Colonel Henry Lee, whose knowledge of Boston 
in this century is apparently unlimited, says that 
my father's parishioners, the North End people of 
those days, had a decided flavor of their own which 
would have appealed to his imagination. 

Mrs. Minot Pratt, a parishioner in her youth, 
says that her father's family had dreaded any 
change from their beloved minister, but that Mr. 
Emerson came among them as sweetly and natu- 
rally as Mr. Ware in their joys and in their afflic- 
tions, and in this another lady who was present 
concurred. They both remembered Mrs. Emerson, 
and said she used to come to one service on Sun- 
days in a carriage because of her delicate health, 
though in those days only the Parkmans came to 



MARRIAGE. 39 

church in a carriage. Mrs. Pratt described her as 
very beautiful, and says that she seemed to remind 
people of a flower. She speaks of Mr. Emerson's 
delivery as very naturaland free from the "minis- 
terial tone ; " remarkably quiet ; and she mentioned 
especially his selection of hymns and reading of 
them. I remember his often saying that the test 
of a good pulpit delivery was that a minister 
" should be able to read sense and poetry into any 
hymn in the hymn-book." 

In the summer of 1829 Mr. Emerson went with 
Ellen Tucker and her family on a driving journey 
in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Under this 
treatment she apparently improved and new hope 
revived. On the last day of September they were 
married at Concord, New Hampshire, and he 
brought her to Boston to the house of his parish- 
ioners and life -long friends Mr. and Mrs. Abel 
Adams in Chardon Street. Dr. Jackson advising 
against Mrs. Emerson's going South for the win- 
ter, they took a house in the same street, — Mr. 
Emerson's mother assuming the burden of the 
house-keeping, and his brother Charles, then study- 
ing law, was one of their family. But in spite of 
care and nursing and cheerful courage and hope 
and even gayety on her part, the young wife grew 
yet more delicate, and in March, 1830, her hus- 
band had to carry her southwards, leaving her with 
her family, himself returning to his work. She re- 



40 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

turned with the next summer, but faded gradually 
away, and died on the 8th of February, 1831, only 
a year and a half after her marriage. 

Mr. Ware's health being seriously impaired he 
had meanwhile resigned, and all the duties of the 
Second Church fell to Mr. Emerson. His relation 
to his people had become close : he and they had 
shared joy and grief, but as he grew he found the 
ti'aditions of the church, even in its most liberal 
aspect in New England, oppressive, and the expec- 
tations of his people often hampered him. 

He recoiled at Prayer in church practice, — a 
stated observance which must take place whether 
the minister was in the proper frame of mind or 
not. He felt that rites, natural and spontaneous 
in the early days of the church, had lost for many 
if not most worshippers all but their form, and 
therefore that it would be wiser and more honest 
to drop them or perform them in a way more natu- 
ral to the people of the day, remembering that 
these were but symbols, and believing that the 
Oriental phraseology and forms, instead of inten- 
sifying, shut oft' the rays of the truth. 

In June of 1832 he proposed to his church that 
they should dispense with the use of the bread and 
wine in the Lord's Supper, and not insist upon the 
authority for its observance. It seems as if he had 
had little doubt that his people would be willing to 
give up the form and keep the spirit, and I have 



PARTING FROM HIS CHURCH. 41 

been told by one of his flock that many of the 
younger members of his church were ready to go 
with him in his views and practice, though one lady 
came to him after the meeting and said, " You 
have taken my Lord away and I know not where 
you have laid Him," and I have read the sorrowful 
entries at this time in the diary of one of the most 
earnest of the younger worshippers. The church 
refused to allow him to make the changes he pro- 
posed or discontinue his part of the rite. 

During the time while the question of his rela- 
tions with the church was under the consideration 
of the committee, he went alone to the mountains, 
to consider his duty. He very fairly stated to 
himself the other side of the question, how for his 
aversion to a form in which he had been brought 
up, and which usage and association had endeared 
to many of the best of his flock, he was about to 
break the strong tie that bound him to his people 
and enabled him, after painful years of prepara- 
tion, to be a light and help and comfort to them. 
But to preserve this bond, he must at the very 
altar, where all thought should be highest and all 
action truest, do violence to his spiritual instincts 
and smother his convictions and admit that form 
could outweigh spirit. Whether or not the lower 
considerations of a pleasant and settled sphere of 
usefulness presented themselves, this was enough, 
and he came down from the mountain having said, 



42 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

" Get thee behind me, Satan," to meet his people, 
explained very simply to them his belief that the 
Scriptural observance had not the claims of au- 
thority, for their satisfaction, but frankly stating 
that his own objection was not of texts, but the 
witness against the rite in his own breast, and he 
resigned his charge. He and his people parted in 
all kindness. 

He had said in his journal before this time : " I 
have sometimes thought that to be a good min- 
ister it was necessary to leave the ministry." Yet 
this could not be done without the wrench being 
felt ; and though he had for the last years been a 
stronger man, now his health began to fail again, 
and in November he felt that he must go again in 
search of strength. He was tempted at first to go 
to the West Indies whither his brother Edward, 
worn out and with life in peril through his untir- 
ing, ambitious labors, had gone to recover, if he 
might, but some wish to see the ancient cities and a 
stronger desire to meet a few men who had moved 
him by their works, namely, Coleridge, Landor, 
Wordsworth, and chiefly Carlyle, led him eastward, 
and on Christmas Day, 1832, he sailed out of Bos- 
ton Bay on a brig bound for Malta. The winter 
voyage of nearly six weeks in a small vessel at 
once refreshed him ; he always throve upon phys- 
ical hardship, and took a certain pleasure in it, 
though he did not like the sea, and always main- 



ROME. 43 

tained that it was only attractive where it met the 
land. He went to Sicily, then Naples, Rome and 
Florence. 

From Rome he writes to his Aunt Mary : — 

" Did they tell you that I went away from home 
a wasted, peevish invalid? Well, I have been 
mending ever since, and am now in better health 
than I remember to have enjoyed since I was in 
college. How should one be sick in Rome ? " 

Yet he found that, as he had foreseen, he could 
not leave his load behind. He was content to spend 
some months in Europe, as one makes up one's 
mind to go to a hospital for just the needful weeks 
and no more. He saw what he must, and but for 
his impatience was fitted to enjoy, but felt that his 
work lay in another hemisphere. With his life's 
work in the New World hardly begun, he was in 
no mood for crumbling palaces, mellow paintings 
and bygone Greek art. Yet many years later he 
wrote to his friend, Mr. Bradford, at that time 
abroad : — 

" How gladly I would help you see London, 
which you like not alone ! How gladly go to Paris 
and to Rome. I seem to have been driven away 
from Rome by unseen angel with sword or whip, 
for nothing would have served me so well and 
dearly as Rome, and I have never been able to 
recall any reason I had for returning. But now to 
go were very different." 



44 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

He was lonely and hungering for friendships 
with men worthy of the time. That to find such 
was his main desire appears in all his writings then, 
and his trust that they would be given him, com- 
plete. 

" Alone in Rome ? Why Kome is lonely too ; — 
Besides, you need not be alone ; the soul 
Shall have society of its own rank. 
Be great, be true, and all the Scipios, 
The Catos, the wise patriots of Rome 
Shall flock to you, and tarry by your side, 
And comfort you with their high company. 

You must be like them if you desire them. 

And ever in the strife of your own thoughts 
Obey the noble impulse : that is Rome : 

Wait then, sad friend, wait in majestic peace 

The hour of Heaven. Generously trust 

Thy fortune's web to the beneficent hand 

That until now has put his world in fee 

To thee. He watches for thee still. His love 

Broods over thee, and as God lives in heaven 

However long thou walkest solitary — 

The hour of Heaven shall come, the man appear." 

He went to Florence and saw Walter Savage 
Landor, and took much pleasure in the company 
and guidance of Horatio Greenough the sculptor. 
But in England were the main magnets. He 
passed through France, making but short stay in 



ENGLAND. 45 

Paris, and crossed the Channel in July, to seek out 
Wordsworth and Carlyle : — 

" Am I who have hung over their works in my 
chamber at home not to see those men in the flesh 
and thank them and interchange some thoughts 
with them when 1 am passing their very doors ? " 

He had letters, but he did not often present 
them. He told me that his custom was when he 
felt a wish to know any person, to write him a let- 
ter when he was in the neighborhood, that the re- 
ceiver might judge by it whether he shared the 
wish for acquaintance and could then bid the 
stranger come if there seemed grounds where their 
sympathies could meet. I remember that a push- 
ing and vain young lecturer, who came to Concord, 
asked an acquaintance with whom he stayed for an 
introduction to Mr. Emerson, who had attended his 
lecture the night before. While his friend, having 
presented him, went out to fasten his horse, the 
young man asked my father to " endorse him," as 
he expressed it, " as a lecturer," saying that various 
noted literary men had done so. " My young 
friend," said Mr. Emerson, " do you not know that 
there is but one person who can recommend you ? " 
" Why, who is that, sir ? " " Yourself:' 

With difficulty Emerson found Carlyle buried 
among the lonely hills and moors of Nithsdale, but 
the meeting was a white day in the lives of both, 
and then began a friendship that remained strong 



46 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

to the end. In " English Traits " and elsewhere 
my father has told of the visits to the few people 
whose writings at that time appealed to him, and 
his good friend in England, Mr. Alexander Ire- 
land, and Mr. Conway have told in their books the 
story of the incidents of this visit. I will note here 
that he preached in Edinburgh in the Unitarian 
Chapel. 

He had found the friend he came on faith to see ; 
he loved him and hoped all things from his strength 
and truth, in spite of the extravagant expression 
and doleful views which he tried to believe he 
would outgrow, but still there was a disappoint- 
ment, and on the voyage home he notes that he 
had met men of far less power than those he had 
met abroad who had greater insight into religious 
truth. In his journal he wrote : — 

" I am very glad my travelling is done. A man 
not old feels himself too old to be a vagabond. The 
people at their work, the people whose vocations I 
interrupt by my letters of introduction accuse me 
by their looks for leaving my business to hinder 
theirs." He felt it was for the New World men to 
answer the Old World men what the New Religion 
was to be for which mankind was waiting and the 
hour ripe. His strength had returned, and this 
with the strong necessity which he felt to do what 
he might to answer this question raised his spirits. 

He reached Boston October 9th and wrote : " It 



RETURN HOME. 47 

is the true heroism and the true wisdom, Hope. 
The wise are always cheerful. The reason is (and 
it is a blessed reason) that the eye sees that the 
ultimate issues of all things are good." He took 
lodgings, wrote down religiously the thought that 
each day brought, and preached as opportunity 
offered. 

He had officiated in New Bedford before in Dr. 
Dewey's pulpit, and now was invited there again 
to preach for several Sundays. This visit was 
memorable to him, for he came intimately in con- 
tact with the more advanced and spiritually-minded 
Quakers and was strongly influenced by the con- 
versation with Miss Mary Rotch, one of their 
saints. He heard the extreme doctrine of Obedi- 
ence as accepted by the Friends, submission of the 
soul, renunciation of the will, and then trusting 
implicitly the divine motion in the breast. 

New Bedford, February 12, 1834. 

Journal. " The sublime religion of Miss Rotch 
yesterday. , She was very much disciplined, she 
said, in the years of Quaker dissensions, and 
driven inward, driven home, to find an anchor, 
until she learned to have no choice, to acquiesce 
without understanding the reason when she found 
an obstruction to any particular course of acting. 
She objected to having this spiritual direction 
called an impression, or an intimation, or an 



48 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

oracle. It was none of them. It was so simple it 
could hardly be spoken of." 

This doctrine he had arrived at by another path, 
but spirit and not form was what he had been striv- 
ing for in public worship, and the simple worship 
of the more liberal Quakers pleased him much. 

Not long after this, his cousin, the Rev. David 
Green Haskins, tells that when asked by him about 
his sympathy with Swedenborgian ideas, and to de- 
fine his religious position, Mr. Emerson said very 
slowly, " I believe I am more of a Quaker than 
anything else. I believe in the ' still small voice,' 
and that voice is Christ within us." 

The New Bedford Unitarians asked him to be 
their settled pastor. Dr. Dewey having left them, 
and to this he inclined, but told them that prayer 
was too sacred an act to be done perfunctorily at 
stated times, whether the Spirit came or no, and 
that if he came it must be understood that that 
part of the service must be, or not, as he was im- 
pelled at the moment. To these terms the parish 
objected and he declined the offer. He lectured 
in Boston that winter and preached also at Plym- 
outh, and there met Miss Lydia Jackson, his future 
wife. 

The Lyceum, an institution then rather of cul- 
ture than of amusement, was being formed in most 
of the towns and cities of New England, and 



THE NEW LIFE. 49 

spreading rapidly westward and southward. The 
freedom of its platform giving an opportunity for 
the widest range and frankest expression of opin- 
ion became more and more attractive to the 
preacher who, on leaving the pulpit, had told his 
people that he should always continue to teach the 
truth as he conceived it, and he soon found that 
people would hear approvingly, and even welcome, 
doctrine arriving in secular garb which they felt 
committed against if it came clothed in ecclesias- 
tical phrase from the pulpit. He wrote about this 
time : — 

" I please myself with contemplating the felicity 
of my present situation — may it last ! It seems 
to me singularly free, and invites me to every virtue 
and to great improvement." 

He now felt that he had begun to learn ; through 
Nature he was to study the soul and God ; that 
this must be done in the solitude of the country, 
and he longed to reestablish a home and bring to 
it his mother and his brothers Edward and Charles, 
who were almost a part of himself. William, all 
too early called, as we have seen, to be the prop 
and stay of the family, kept school for several 
years, studied for the ministry at Gottingen in 
Germany, but was turned by honest doubts from 
the profession of his fathers. There is an excel- 
lent letter written by him to Dr. Ripley in Septem- 
ber, 1830, on the observance of the Lord's Supper, 



50 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

in which he sets forth very clearly but respectfully 
the argument that it was not intended to be oblig- 
atory. This strongly suggests the source of the 
reasons set forth by his brother later for the sat- 
isfaction of the Second Church, although with 
Waldo his instinct, rather than arguments of au- 
thority, dictated his course. William chose the 
profession of Law, which he exercised with fidelity 
and honor in New York for many years. In his 
busy life he always cherished his scholarly tastes, 
and he and his brother Waldo in days of prosper- 
ity and adversity stood by one another most loyally. 
My father had a day-dream of settling in Berk- 
shire ; felt that the country life would reestablish 
the health of his younger brothers, to whom he was 
now in position to offer a home, and that they per- 
haps might together edit and write a review, and 
he pleased himself with the thought of the varied 
talent that the four brothers could combine upon 
the problems of the day, for William in New York 
found time from his law work to write lectures and 
reviews. But Edward bravely stayed at his work 
in the island, Charles had begun the study of law 
in Concord in the office of Samuel Hoar, Esq., and 
was forming yet stronger ties to Concord, and for 
Waldo, really dependent on the stimulus of occa- 
sional access to cultivated persons, to the Athe- 
naeum and College libraries and such works of art 
as were then to be seen in New England, and, re- 



EDWARD BLISS EMERSON. 61 

quiring also a public for his lectures, Berkshire 
was too remote. 

But here at hand was an ancestral town, suffi- 
ciently remote, yet near enough to the city for his 
needs, its river meadows having for him happy 
associations of his boyhood. The presence of his 
brother Charles turned the scale, and in the autumn 
of 1834 he came with his mother, and they were 
received as boarders at the Manse. They came in 
sadness, for, only a few days earlier, letters had 
come from Porto Rico telling of the death of Ed- 
ward Bliss Emerson. 

Of Edward, his next older brother had a roman- 
tic admiration, for he saw in him qualities that he 
missed in himself. Edward was handsome, grace- 
ful, had a military carriage and had been an 
officer in the college company; he had confidence 
and executive ability, great ambition and an un- 
sleeping, goading conscience that never would let 
him spare himself. He was eloquent, but his speech 
had a lofty and almost scornful tone. My father 
said : " Edward and I as boys were thrown much 
together in our studies, for he stood always at the 
top of his (a younger) class, and I low in mine." 
He had, while studying in the office of Daniel 
Webster with the commendation of his chief, of 
whose sons he was the tutor, lost his reason for a 
time through years of overwork and privation, and 
though he recovered it, his main spring seemed 



62 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

broken, and he went to the West Indies and filled 
a place as clerk in a commercial house, hoping to 
regain his power. 

" I see him with superior smile, 
Hunted by Sorrow's grisly train, 
In lands remote, in toil and pain 
With angel patience labor on 
With the high port he wore erewhile, 
When foremost of the youthful band, 
The prizes in all lists he won, 
Nor bate one jot of heart or hope." 

Mr. Emerson would have considered it a fortu- 
nate conjunction of the stars that brought his fiery 
and affectionate sibyl, Aunt Mary, in her nomadic 
perigrinations from one part of New England to 
another (for she was too concentrated a bitter-cor- 
dial to be ever taken for a long time at any one 
boarding place), at this time to Concord. 

" Concord, November 24, 1834. 

" Aunt Mary boards in the village and keeps up 
a surprisingly good understanding with the people 
of this world, considering her transcendental way 
of living. Yesterday she came here with shabbiest 
horse and chaise, which she says she saw standing 
at the door where she was shopping, and, having 
found out whom it belonged to, she asked the man to 
let her go and ride whilst he was making purchases, 
for she wanted to go up to Dr. Ripley's. The man, 



MARY MOODY EMERSON. 63 

I suppose, demurred, so she told him she was his 
own towns woman, born within a mile of him, and 
finally, she says, when she left him, in the gig, he 
told her ' not to hurry.' But so she lives from day 
to day." 

Once she even impressed the horse of a man who 
came to call the physician at whose house she 
boarded, and rode sidewise on a man's saddle to 
the Manse, arrayed in her dimity shroud, which, 
tired of waiting for death, she used as a day -gown, 
and over it, on this occasion, threw a scarlet shawl 
which somebody had laid down in the entry. 

But these constitutional oddities of this strange 
enthusiast must not so far draw attention that her 
achievements in culture and piety be forgotten, 
and the wonder of them in face of the forlorn cir- 
cumstances of her rearing. It is not easy to read 
unmoved these sentences of her diary : — 

" My oddities were never designed — effect of 
an uncalculating constitution at first, then through 
isolation. . . . It is so universal with all classes to 
avoid me that I blame nobody. . . . As a traveller 
enters some fine palace and finds all the doors 
closed and he only allowed the use of some ave- 
nues and passages, so have I wandered from the 
cradle over the apartments of the social affections 
or the cabinets of natural or moral philosophy, the 
recesses of ancient and modern lore. All say, — 



54 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

Forbear to enter the pales of the initiated by birth, 
wealth, talents and patronage. I submit with de- 
light, for it is the echo of a decree from above ; and 
from the highway hedges where I get lodging and 
from the rays which burst forth when the crowd are 
entering these noble saloons, whilst I stand at the 
doors, I get a pleasing vision which is an earnest of 
the interminable skies where the mansions are pre- 
pared for the poor. . . . Should He make me a blot 
on the fair face of his Creation, I should rejoice 
in his will. . . . Yes, love thee and all thou dost 
though thou sheddest frost and darkness on every 
path of mine." 

Settled in the little room in the south gable of 
the Manse my father wrote in his journal : — 

"Concord, November 15, 1834. 

"Hail to the quiet fields of my fathers. Not 
wholly unattended by supernatural friendship and 
favor let me come hither. Bless my purposes as 
they are simple and virtuous. Coleridge's fine let- 
ter ^ comes in aid of the very thoughts I was re- 
volving. And be it so. Henceforth I design not 
to utter any speech, poem or book that is not 
entirely and peculiarly my work. I will say at 
public lectures and the like, those things which I 
have meditated for their own sake and not for the 
first time with a view to that occasion." 

^ In London Literary Gazette, Sept. 13, 1834. 



THE CONCORD HOME. 65 

That winter he lectured in Boston and preached 
in various places, among others in Plymouth, and 
there became engaged to Miss Lydia Jackson, an 
event which made it the more necessary for him 
to find a home, and though she had hope that he 
might come to Plymouth, he writes in February 
that he shall hardly get away from Concord and 
must win her to love it. 

He thought at first of buying the house on the 
spur of Punkatasset towards Dr. Ripley's (since 
owned by the late Captain Richard Barrett), but, 
a good opportunity occurring, he purchased a new 
and very well built house and small barn with two 
acres of land, the rather unattractive situation of 
which was in a measure offset by being on the 
stage-road to Boston, and also, while near the vil- 
lage, being only divided by a few fields from pine- 
woods and hills, soon to have spiritual values to 
him, and from the lonely fields of which he sings 
in the Dirge. 

Nor was the human interest lacking. As a boy 
and youth in his visits with his mother and broth- 
ers to his grandmother, daughter of Rev. Daniel 
Bliss and widow of Rev. William Emerson, then 
the wife of Dr. Ripley, he had necessarily met at 
the Manse the leading citizens of the town when 
they called upon his step-grandfather, the venera- 
ble clergyman, and there and in his rides with the 
latter gentleman, when in his chaise he visited his 



66 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

parishioners in their seasons of joy and sorrow, he 
learned the histories of the families who lived in 
the scattered farms of the river town, many of 
whom in the sixth generation still tilled the hold- 
ing originally granted their ancestor. The popu- 
lation was more stable in those days ; there was 
absolutely no foreign element, except the descend- 
ants of the negro slaves of an earlier period. 

Dr. Ripley held among the people of the town 
a position by right of his office, his long residence 
and his virtues that it is hard for a person who has 
no memory of those days to understand. In the 
spirit of his Puritan predecessors he felt himself 
like Moses in the wilderness, a shepherd and judge 
of the people, and that he had unquestionable right 
to know about their temporal and spiritual affairs, 
and in the true Hebrew Spirit of the early New 
Englanders he pointed out to his young kinsman 
the recompense in this world of the deeds of the 
men, even to children's children. 

Thus when Mr. Emerson moved his household 
gods to the town which was thereafter to be his 
home, it was in a sense his home already, with per- 
sonal and ancestral ties for him and he knew its 
daily and its traditional life, and his being chosen 
to review its Past and speak the word of good 
omen for the Future on the day when the Town 
celebrated the completing of the second century 
since its planting, was not like the calling in a 



CONCORD ORATION. 57 

stranger among the people. This choice was a 
pleasant welcome to him from them, and it was 
a happy circumstance for him (the nature of his 
pursuits obliging him to live a little apart) that 
his task in its preparation and its fulfilment 
strengthened and drew closer the bonds of interest 
and affection that bound him to his new home. He 
made diligent search among the ancient and almost 
undecipherable town records, he visited the old 
villagers, survivors of Concord Fight, read the his- 
torico-religious chronicles of the early New Eng- 
land writers, and found the notes of the events of 
Concord's part in the beginning of the Ke volution 
in the diary of his grandfather, her young and 
patriotic minister in those days. 

On Saturday, September 12th, the celebration 
occurred. Mr. Emerson gave his oration, his kins- 
man, the Rev. Dr. Ripley being one of the chap- 
lains of the day, and his brother Charles Chauncy 
Emerson one of the marshals. 

He passed Sunday with his relatives at the 
Manse, and. on Monday, the 14th, drove in a chaise 
to Plymouth, where he was married in the evening 
to Lydia Jackson, at her home, the old Winslow 
Mansion on North Street, and the next morning set 
forth in the chaise again and brought his bride 
before sunset to their new home in Concord, a 
substantial house where the newer turnpike left 
the " Great Road " to Boston. 



58 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

Mr. Emerson never repented this choice of a 
home which proved exactly fitted for his purpose ; 
gave privacy and company enough, and the habit 
of the town favored the simple living which he 
valued. 

To the happy early association with the hill by 
the Manse and the Great Fields and Meadows, 
were now to be added new formed ones with the 
low hills on his southeastern horizon clothed with 
a continuous wood which hid Walden among its 
oaks and dark pines. 

He went to work, as I shall presently tell, in the 
garden below his house, but the sight of the great 
garden across the brook but half a mile off was 
strong to lure him away. "Look at the sunset 
when you are distant half a mile from the vil- 
lage, and I fear you will forget your engagement 
to the tea-party. That tint has a dispersive power 
not only of memory, but of duty. But the city 
lives by remembering." The garden at home was 
often a hindrance and care, but he soon bought an 
estate which brought him unmingled pleasure, first 
the grove of white pines on the shore of Walden, 
and later the large tract on the farther shore run- 
ning up to a rocky pinnacle from which he could 
look down on the Pond itself, and on the other side 
to the Lincoln woods and farms, Nobscot blue in 
the South away beyond Fairhaven and the river 
gleaming in the afternoon sun. It is of this that 
he wrote : — 



WALDEN LEDGE. 69 

" If I could put my woods in song 
And tell what 's there enjoyed, 
All men would to my garden throng 
And leave the cities void. 

" My garden is a forest ledge 
Which older forests bound ; 
The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge, 
Then plunge to depths profound. 

" Self-sown my stately garden grows; 
The wind, and wind-blown seed, 
Cold April rain and colder snows 
My hedges plant and feed."* 

Brought up mainly near the city, with mind filled 
in youth with such images of nature as poets of 
an artificial age and a long cultivated island had 
reflected in their more or less distorted mirrors, 
he had come to study Nature at the fountain-head, 
and found, as he had suspected or he would not 
have come, that all was new. 

1838. 

Journal. " The American artist who would carve 
a wood-god and who was familiar with the forest in 
Maine, where enormous fallen pine-trees ' cumber 
the forest floor,' where huge mosses depending from 
the trees, and the mass of the timber give a savage 
and haggard strength to the grove, would produce 
a very different statue from the sculptor who only 

^ Mt Garden (in Poems, Riverside Edition, p. 197) and Wal- 
DEN (see Appendix of same volume, p. 207 ) were originally one 
poem. 



60 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

knew a European woodland, — the tasteful Greek, 
for example." 

" It seems as if we owed to literature certain im- 
pressions concerning nature which nature did not 
justify. By Latin and English Poetry, I was born 
and bred in an oratorio of praises of nature, flow- 
ers, birds and mountains, sun and moon, and now 
I find I know nothing of any of these fine things, 
that I have conversed with the merest surface and 
show of them all ; arid of their essence or of their 
history know nothing. Now furthermore I melan- 
choly discover that nobody, — that not these chant- 
ing poets themselves, — know anything sincere of 
these handsome natures they so commended ; that 
they contented themselves with the passing chirp 
of a bird or saw his spread wing in the sun as 
he fluttered by, they saw one morning or two in 
their lives, and listlessly looked at sunsets and 
repeated idly these few glimpses in their song. 

" But if I go into the forest, I find all new and 
undescribed; nothing has been told me. The 
screaming of wild geese was never heard ; the thin 
note of the titmouse and his bold ignoring of the 
bystander ; the fall of the flies that patter on the 
leaves like rain ; the angry hiss of some bird that 
crepitated at me yesterday ; the formation of tur- 
pentine, and indeed any vegetation and animation, 
any and all are alike undescribed. Every man 
that goes into the woods seems to be the first man 



WOODLAND. 61 

that ever went into a wood. His sensations and 
his world are new. You really think that nothing 
can be said about morning and evening, and the 
fact is, morning and evening have not yet begun to 
be described. 

" When I see them I am not reminded of .these 
Homeric or Miltonic or Shakspearian or Chauce- 
rian pictures, but 1 feel a pain of an alien world, or 
I am cheered with the moist, warm, glittering, bud- 
ding and melodious hour that takes down the nar- 
row walls of my soul and extends its pulsation and 
life to the very horizon. That is Morning ; to 
cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this 
sickly body and to become as large as the World." 

June, 1841. 

Journal. " The rock seemed good to me. I 
think we can never afford to part with Matter. 
How dear and beautiful it is to us. As water to 
our thirst so is this rock to our eyes and hands 
and feet. . . . What refreshment, what health, what 
magic affinity, ever an old friend, ever like a dear 
friend or brother when we chat affectedly with 
strangers comes in this honest face, whilst we prat- 
tle with men, and takes a grave liberty with us 
and shames us out of our nonsense. 

" The flowers lately, especially when I see for the 
first time this season an old acquaintance, — a gerar- 
dia, a lespedeza, — have much to say on Life and 



62 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

Death. 'You have much discussion,' they seem 
to say, on ' Immortality. Here it is : here are we 
who have spoken nothing on the matter.' And as 
I have looked from this lofty rock lately, our 
human life seemed very short beside this ever- 
renewing race of trees. ' Your life,* they say, ' is 
but a few spinnings of this top. Forever the for- 
est germinates ; forever our solemn strength renews 
its knots and nodes and leaf-buds and radicles.' 
Grass and trees have no individuals as man counts 
individuality. The continuance of their race is 
Immortality ; the continuance of ours is not. So 
they triumph over us, and when we seek to answer 
or to say something, the good tree holds out a 
bunch of green leaves in your face, or the wood- 
bine five graceful fingers, and looks so stupid- 
beautiful, so innocent of all argument, that our 
mouths are stopped and Nature has the last word." 
" I cannot tell why I should feel myself such a 
stranger in nature. I am a tangent to their sphere, 
and do not lie level with this beauty. And yet the 
dictate of the hour is to forget all I have mis- 
learned ; to cease from man, and to cast myself 
into the vast mould of nature." 

In a letter to his wife just before their marriage 
telling why he preferred to live in Concord rather 
than in Plymouth, as she had hoped, he says : 
" Wherever I go, therefore, I guard and study my 



WOODLAND. 63 

rambling propensities with a care that is ridiculous 
to people, but to me is the care of my high call- 
ing." 

Strangers wish to see his study ; the woods were 
his best study during the years of his greatest 
spiritual activity, and the study, so-called, at home, 
rather his library and writing room. In months 
when the weather allowed he went often to the 
oracle in the pine wood and waited with joyful 
trust for the thought. 

** In dreamy woods what forms abound 
That elsewhere never poet found: 
Here roices ring, and pictures burn, 
And grace on grace where'er I turn." 

There he felt that he saw things healthily, largely, 
in their just order and perspective. 

He sometimes took his note-book with him, but 
more often recorded the thought on his return, 
striving to give it exactly as it came to him, for he 
felt that men were 

*< Pipes through which the breath of God doth blow 
A momentary music." 

Even in the winter storms he was no stranger to 
the woods, and the early journals show that he 
liked to walk alone at night for the inspiration he 
ever found in the stars. 

January, 1841. 
Journal. " All my thoughts are foresters. I have 
scarce a day-dream on which the breath of the 



64 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

pines has not blown, and their shadows waved. 
Shall I not therefore call my little book Forest 

Essays ? " 

All through his life he kept a journal. On the 
first leaf of that for 1837 he wrote : — 

" This book is my savings' bank. I grow richer 
because I have somewhere to deposit my earnings, 
and fractions are worth more to me because cor- 
responding fractions are waiting here that shall be 
made integers by their addition." 

The thoughts thus received and garnered in his 
journals were later indexed, and a great part of 
them reappeared in his published works. They 
were religiously set down just as they came, in no 
order except chronological, but later they were 
grouped, enlarged or pruned, illustrated, worked 
into a lecture or discourse, and after having in this 
capacity undergone repeated testing and rearrang- 
ing, were finally carefully sifted and more rigidly 
pruned and were printed as essays. Some one said 
to him, "You take out all the most interesting 
parts" (anecdotes and illustrations used in the lec- 
ture room), " and call it ' putting on their Greek 
jackets.' " 

But he did not go to Nature as the Man of 
Science does, nor as the artist often does, to note 
mere physical facts and laws, or surface beauty. 
He saw in visible nature only a garment giving to 
wise eyes the hint of what lay underneath : — 



NATURE'S TEACHING. 63 

*' Ever the words of the gods resound ; 

But the porches of man's ear 
Seldom in this low life's round 

Are unsealed, that they may hear. 
Wandering voices in the air 

And murmurs in the wold 
Speak what I cannot declare, 

Yet cannot all withhold." 

When he returned to his room and took up 
the books of the authors, there was sometimes a 
shock felt. He tried them by Nature's great 
standards, and they perhaps were found wanting, 
but in the cases of the greatest masters, Nature but 
illustrated their idealism and stamped it as true. 
Not only among the poets and prophets, but (per- 
haps with Goethe as a bridge) in the works of 
the advancing men of Science, — John Hunter, La- 
marck, Lyell, Owen, Darwin, — he was quick to 
recognize a great thought, and his own spiritual 
studies in Concord woods made him meet almost 
more than half way the new discoveries of pro- 
gressive improvement with unbounded possibilities 
in the living creature. 

But he never lost sight of the fact that, if the 
pine-tree, from the moment of its sprouting, acted 
on the sand and rock and air and water, subdued 
and converted them into beauty and strength of 
the pine-tree, and not of the oak or vine or ani- 
mal, so he must bear his relation to family, village, 
country, world, and react with these surroundings 
for beauty and virtue. 



66 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

" Natural History by itself has no value ; it is 
like a single sex, but marry it to human history, 
and it is poetry. Whole floras, all Linnaeus's or 
Buffon's volumes contain not one line of poetry; 
but the meanest natural fact, the habit of a plant, 
the organs, or work, or noise of an insect, applied 
to a fact in human nature, is beauty, is poetry, is 
truth at once." And so we come back to him as 
citizen and head of a family. 

Had Mr. Emerson inherited no bond to Concord, 
he would on principle have taken a householder's 
and citizen's interest in the town which sheltered 
him. The house in Concord had a small garden 
on the south side, near the brook, in which Mrs. 
Emerson at once established her favorite flowers, 
plants and seeds, brought from the Old Colony, 
especially her favorites, tulips and roses, but a part 
of it was reserved for vegetables and already pro- 
vided with a few apple, pear and plum-trees, and 
here Mr. Emerson began his husbandry, leaving 
his study to do a little work there every day. 

Journal. " The young minister did very well, but 
one day he married a wife, and after that he no- 
ticed that though he planted corn never so often, 
it was sure to come up tulips, contrary to all the 
laws of botany." 

In the spring following his marriage he was 
sought out in the garden by one of his townsmen 
who came to notify him of his first civic honor, 



FIRST TOWN OFFICE. 67 

namely, that at tlie March-meeting he had been 
elected one of the hog-reeves for the ensuing year. 
It was the ancient custom of the town to consider 
the newly-married man eligible for this office. 
Probably the neighbor's grounds had suffered from 
some stray shote that morning, and he came to 
notify the proper officer that he must do his duty. 

But Mr. Emerson soon began to assume duties 
and relations towards the people and institutions 
of the town, in which his fitness was more manifest. 
Mrs. Emerson and his brother Charles, who made 
his home with them, both had large classes in the 
Sunday-school, then a comparatively new estab- 
lishment, and felt a great interest in them. One 
of the scholars of Charles tells me that the hour 
of his teaching and talk with them was the one 
bright spot in the desperate New England Sabbath 
of those days. Mrs. Emerson used to have meet- 
ings of the teachers in her parlor and her hus- 
band used to come in from his study and talk with 
the young people. 

He attended church, if at home, during the first 
part of his life in Concord, certainly during the 
time that Dr. Ripley officiated there, and occasion- 
ally supplied the pulpit, though he seems for some 
reason to have preferred not to preach in Concord, 
although for some time after settling there he reg- 
idarly preached in East Lexington, and often ac- 
cepted invitations to preach in other pulpits until 
after 1840. 



68 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

My mother gives this anecdote of his East Lex- 
ington preaching, which should be preserved as 
showing his entire courage and sincerity. He was 
reading one of the old sermons ; suddenly he 
stopped and said quietly, " The passage which I 
have just read I do not &eZ^e^?e, but it was wrongly 
placed." 

1840. 

Journal. " What is more alive among works of 
art than our plain old wooden church, built a cen- 
tury and a quarter ago, with the ancient New Eng- 
land spire. I pass it at night and stand and listen 
to the beats of the clock like heart-beats ; not 
sounding, as Elizabeth Hoar well observed, so much 
like tickings, as like a step. It is the step of 
Time. You catch the sound first by looking at 
the clock face. And then you see this wooden 
tower rising thus alone, but stable and aged, toward 
the midnight stars. It has affiance and privilege 
with them. Not less than the marble cathedral it 
had its origin in sublime aspirations, in the august 
religion of man. Not less than those stars to 
which it points, it began to be in the soul." 

"At church to-day I felt how unequal is this 
match of words against things. Cease, O thou un- 
authorized talker, to prate of consolation, and res- 
ignation, and spiritual joys, in neat and balanced 
sentences. For I know these men who sit below, 



THE VILLAGE CHURCH. 69 

and on the hearing of these words look up. Hush 
quickly ! for care and calamity are things to them. 
There is Mr. A., the shoemaker, whose daughter 
has gone mad. And he is looking up through his 
spectacles to hear what you can offer for his case. 
Here is my friend, whose scholars are all leaving 
him, and he knows not what to turn his hand to 
next. Here is my wife who has come to church in 
hope of being soothed and strengthened after being 
wounded by the sharp tongue of a slut in her house. 
Here is the stage-driver who has the jaundice and 
cannot get well. Here is B. who failed last week, 
and he is looking up. O speak things, then, or 
hold thy tongue.'* 

" I delight in our pretty church music and to 
hear that poor slip of a girl, without education, 
without thought, yet show this fine instinct in her 
singing, so that every note of her song sounds to 
me like an adventure and a victory in the ' ton- 
welt^ and whilst all the choir beside stay fast by 
their leader and the bass-viol, this angel voice goes 
choosing, choosing, choosing on, and with the pre- 
cision of genius keeps its faithful road and floods 
the house with melody." 

" A fine melody again at the church. I always 
thank the gracious Urania when our chorister 
selects tunes with solos for my singer. My ear 



70 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

waits for those sweet modulations, so pure of all 
manner of personality, so universal that they open 
the ear like the rising of the wind." 

"1838. 

" At church I saw that beautiful child and 

my fine, natural, manly neighbor who bore the 
bread and wine to the communicants with so clear 
an eye and excellent face and manners. That was 
all I saw that looked like God at church. Let 
the clergy beware when the well-disposed scholar 
begins to say, ' I cannot go to church, time is too 
precious." 

In his full manhood he had written when his 
successor was ordained at the Second Church : — 

" We love the venerable house 
Our fathers built to God." 

This sentiment he never lost, but he cared so 

much for the church that it chafed him to hear 

low utilitarian, Honesty-is-the-best-Policy views, or 

cold formalism. He always delighted in a born 

priest, of whatever denomination he chanced to 

wear the gown. 

/wne, 1845. 

Journal. " It was a pleasure yesterday to hear 
Father Taylor preach all day in our country 
church. Men are always interested in a man, and 
the whole various extremes of our little village 
society were for once brought together. Black and 
white, poet and grocer, contractor and lumberman, 



THE VILLAGE CHURCH. 71 

Methodists and preachers, joined with the regular 
congregation in rare union. Oliver Houghton, 
Kimball, John Garrison, Belknap, Britton, the 
Methodist preachers, W. E. Channing, Thoreau, 
Horace Mann, Samuel Hoar, The Curtises, Mrs. 
Barlow, Minot Pratt, Edmund Hosmer, were of 
Taylor's auditory." 

But when he found that the average preacher of 
that day had no help for him, and that sermon and 
prayer jarred rather than accorded with the thought 
which he had received when earnestly listening in 
solitude for the truest word to speak for the help 
of the people, he ceased to go. If those who find 
clouds go simply for example's sake because others 
may find light, how are they not responsible if 
those others, like them, find clouds and go away 
bafaed ? 

" The dervish whined to Said, 
*Thou didst not tarry while I prayed: 

Beware the fire which Eblis burned.* 

But Saadi coldly thus returned, — 
* Once with manlike love and fear 

I gave thee for an hour my ear, 

I kept the sun and stars at bay, 

And love, for words thy tongue could say. 

I cannot sell my heaven again 

For all that rattles in thy brain.' " 

In the town-meetings he took great pleasure. 
In them he saw the safety and strength of New 



72 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

England. " In this institution," he says, " the 
great secret of political science was uncovered, and 
the problem solved how to give every individual 
his fair weight in the government without any dis- 
order from numbers. The roots of society were 
reached. Here the rich gave counsel, but the poor 
also ; and moreover the just and the unjust." It 
pleases him to note how the citizens assume that 
some allowance and license will be given them in 
this, as it were, family-gathering, and that " a man 
felt at liberty to exhibit at town-meeting feelings 
and actions that he would have been ashamed of 
anywhere but amongst his neighbors," because all 
this shows " that if the results of our history are 
approved as wise and good, it was yet a free strife ; 
if the good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel 
did not fail to be suggested ; freedom and virtue, 
if they triumphed, triumphed in a fafr field. And 
so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so 
much ground of assurance of man's capacity for 
self-government." 

He sat among his neighbors and watched the 
plain men of the town manage their affairs with 
the courage of their convictions, and, a speaker by 
profession himself, seldom took part in the debate, 
and then with great hesitancy and modesty, but 
came home to praise the eloquence and strong good- 
sense of his neighbors. 



TOWN MEETING. 73 

November^ 1863. 
Journal. " At the town - meeting one is im- 
pressed with the accumulated virility of the four 
or five men who speak so well to the point, and so 
easily handle the affairs of the town. Only four 
last night, and all so good that they would have 
satisfied me, had I been in Boston or Washington. 
The speech of ^as perfect, and to that hand- 
ful of people, who heartily applauded it." 

And at another time he writes : — 

" The most hard - fisted, disagreeably restless, 
thought-paralyzing companion sometimes turns out 
in the town-meeting to be a fluent, various and 
effective orator. Now I x^xid what all that excess 
of power which chafed and fretted me so much in 
was for." 

The lecture platform was, as he often said, his 
free pulpit. " Lyceums — so that people will let 
you say what you think — are as good a pulpit as 
any other." He took a hearty interest in, and had 
great hopes for the influence of that active focus 
of the intellectual and spiritual life of the village 
for nearly fifty years. This institution was then 
iiew in New England. Concord was one of the 
earliest towns that had formed such an association, 
only five years before Mr. Emerson came there to 
live. It was at first a sort of Mutual Improvement 
Society, and debates between appointed disputants 



74 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

were the usual entertainment ; but these soon gave 
way to lectures on subjects historical, literary, sci- 
entific or philanthropic, though it was soon found 
that these last were so exciting to the New England 
mind, and so closely related to the politics of the 
day that they nearly wrecked the Lyceums. Nev- 
ertheless Mr. Emerson held that these issues, even 
though the firebrands frightened for a time the 
Muses away, could not honestly be ignored in the 
Lyceum, for while the blot remained, the peoj^le 
must look at it. He writes in his journal : — 

« Nommher 9, 1837. 

" Right-minded men have recently been called to 
decide for abolition." 

He received that year a letter from a gentleman, 
in behalf of the Salem Lyceum, requesting him to 
lecture there the next winter, and adding : " The 
subject is of course discretionary with yourself, 
provided no allusions are made to religious contro- 
versy, or other exciting topics upon which the pub- 
lic mind is honestly divided." He writes in his 

journal : "I replied on the same day to Mr. , 

by quoting these words and adding, — ' I am really 
sorry that any person in Salem should think me 
capable of accepting an invitation so encumbered.' " 

Mr. Emerson was at several times Curator of 
the Lyceum ; almost invariably attended its meet- 
ings when in town, but his principal business in 



CONCORD LYCEUM. 75 

winter being the addressing similar bodies all over 
the country, he was necessarily absent much of the 
time. He helped the management in every way 
possible by inducing his literary friends to give 
lectures in Concord, and entertained many of the 
lecturers at his house, though he might not be at 
home. 

In my boyhood I remember hearing of a remark 
made to my father, in conversation about speakers 
for the Lyceum, by a leading citizen of Concord : 
" There are only three persons, as far as I know, 
whose opinions are obnoxious to the members of 
our community : they are, Theodore Parker, Wen- 
dell Phillips, and — if I may be so candid — your- 
self. Sir." However, they bore with a lecture from 
him (sometimes two or even more) nearly every 
winter from 1835 to 1880. 

From the beginning of the anti-slavery struggle 
Mr. Emerson stood for Freedom (indeed he had 
admitted anti-slavery speakers into his pulpit in 
Boston), although while honoring the courage and 
principle of the leaders of the agitation he dis- 
liked the narrowness and bitterness often shown by 
them, and refused to come into the harness of their 
organization. He claimed that his broader work 
included theirs. He saw that his proper work and 
lot in the world would remain neglected and unful- 
filled, should he assume their weapons, take their 
orders and be tied up in their organization ; but 



76 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

when, from his allotted post apart, he saw the oppor- 
tunity, or a great occasion called him, he felt all 
the more bound to show his colors and strike his 
blow for Freedom, and when an issue was pending, 
he usually consented to requests of Garrison or 
Phillips that he would speak, or at least sit on the 
platform, at large meetings in the cities, especially 
if the meeting promised to be stormy. He early 
made an anti-slavery address in Concord (Novem- 
ber 1837). Again, in 1844, on the occasion of the 
anniversary of the emancipation of the slaves in 
the British West Indies. In 1845 he was one of 
the committee at a meeting held in Concord to 
resent the outrage done by citizens of South Car- 
olina to the agent of Massachusetts, sent thither to 
protect the rights of her citizens, our townsman the 
Honorable Samuel Hoar. 

As the agitation v/ent on, the calls were more 
frequent, and often against all his instincts and 
desires he left his study and his pine grove to 
attend meetings where was little to console him. 
He alludes to them occasionally good naturedly 
and with some humor. 

But sadder days were at hand. In September, 
1846, when a poor negro had been seized in Bos- 
ton and carried back to slavery, and a citizens' 
meeting was called in Faneuil Hall, he wrote to 
the Committee : — 



FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW. 11 

" If it shall turn out, as desponding men say, 
that our people do not really care whether Boston 
is a slave port or not, provided our trade thrives, 
then we may at least cease to dread hard times 
and ruin. It is high time our bad wealth came to 
an end. I am sure I shall very cheerfully take my 
share of suffering in the ruin of such a prosperity, 
and shall very willingly turn to the mountains to 
chop wood and seek to find for myself and my 
children labors compatible with freedom and 
honor." 

The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act by Con- 
gress for a time darkened the face of the day, even 
to this apostle of Hope. He woke in the mornings 
with a weight upon him. In his public speeches 
at this time he spoke of it as " a law which every 
one of you will break on the earliest occasion ; a 
law which no man can obey or abet without loss 
of self-respect and forfeiture of the name of a gen- 
tleman." When his children told him that the 
subject given out for their next school composition 
was, The Building of a House, he said, " You must 
be sure to say that no house nowadays is perfect 
without having a nook where a fugitive slave can 
be safely hidden away." 

The national disgrace took Mr. Emerson's mind 
from poetry and philosophy, and almost made him 
for the time a student of law and an advocate. He 
eagerly sought and welcomed all principles in law- 



78 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

books, or broad rulings of great jurists, that Kiglit 

lay behind Statute to guide its application and that 

immoral laws are void. His journals at this epoch, 

one especially called " Liberty," are full of the 

results of his researches, and fragments of speeches 

in which he proposed to use them. 

1852. 

Journal. " I waked last night and bemoaned 
myself because I had not thrown myself into this 
deplorable question of Slavery, which seems to 
want nothing so much as a few assured voices. But 
then in hours of sanity I recover myself, and say, 
God must govern his own world, and knows his 
way out of this pit without my desertion of my post, 
which has none to guard it but me. I have quite 
other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit, im- 
prisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in 
the brain of man, — far retired in the heaven of 
invention, and which, important to the republic 
of man, have no watchman or lover or defender 
but I." 

When Daniel Webster, who had been an idol of 
his youth, turned his back on anti-slavery principles, 
Mr. Emerson in his speeches strongly exposed and 
attacked the great apostate, though still so beloved 
at the North that who ventured to attack him must 
brave angry hisses, and in a speech at Cambridge, 
though interrupted by the outcries and groans of 
young Boston Southern sympathizers, he said : — 



FREEDOM'S BATTLE. 79 

" Nobody doubts that Daniel Webster could 
make a good speech. Nobody doubts that there 
were good and plausible things to be said on the 
part of the South. But this is not a question of 
ingenuity, not a question of syllogisms, but of sides. 
How came lie there f " ^ 

When he threw down his dismal newspaper, 
crossed the brook and pastures, and reached his 
sacred grove of white pines, courage and hope re- 
vived. The oracles he ever found favorable, but 
he saw that he must abide the slow and secure 
working of the great laws. Meantime was the gen- 
eral government corrupt, — let Massachusetts keep 
her hands clean of iniquity. Did Massachusetts 
stoop to be the tool of threatening Carolina, and 
was Boston timid and subservient, — let those 
" who lived by the ragged pine " preserve their 
manly virtue against better days. When he hoed 
his garden, a crop of comfort straightway sprang 
up. 

1852. 

Journal. , " I have confidence in the laws of mor- 
als as of botany. I have planted maize in my field 
every June for seventeen years and I never knew 
it come up strychnine. My parsley, beet, turnip, 
carrot, buck-thorn, chestnut, acorn, are as sure. I 
believe that justice produces justice, and injustice 
injustice. 

^ Lecture on Fugitive Slave Law. 



80 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

• • • • 

" And what number of these Southern majors 
and colonels, and of Yankee lawyers and manufac- 
turers and state-secretaries thanking God in the 
Boston tone, will sufdce to persuade the dreadful 
secrecy of moral nature to forego its appetency, or 
cause to decline its chase of effect?" 

He found comfort also in the talk with his sturdy 

neighbors. 

"1851. 

" Hosmer says : ' Sims came on a good errand ; 
for Sumner is elected, Kantoul and Palfrey are 
likely to be. The State of Massachusetts ought to 
buy that fellow.' " 

Thus the interpreter delighted him by showing 
him his own doctrine of Good out of Evil ; that, in 
a sense, injustice would produce justice. 

On his way to town meeting he saw his next 
neighbor, George Minot, at work, after his lei- 
surely fashion, and asked him if he was not going 
to cast his vote with all honest men for Freedom. 
" No," said this honest Rip van Winkle, " I ain't 
goin'. It 's no use a-balloting, for it won't stay. 
What you do with a gun will stay so." 

The man of the pen was pleased, but did not 
think it a case for a gun yet, so went on to the 
town meeting. 



CIVIC DUTY. 81 

1854. 

Journal. " Those who stay away from election 
think that one vote will do no good. 'Tis but one 
step more to think that one vote will do no harm. 
But if they should come to be interested in them- 
selves, in their career, they would no more stay 
away from the election than from honesty or from 
affection." 

" Let us have the considerate vote of single men 
spoken on their honor and their conscience. What 
a vicious practice is this of our politicians at Wash- 
ington pairing off! As if one man who votes 
wrong going away could excuse you who mean to 
vote right for going away ; or as if your presence 
did not tell in more ways than in your vote. Sup- 
pose the three hundred heroes at Thermopylae had 
paired oft' with three hundred Persians : would it 
have been all the same to Greece, and to history ? " 

He found that to do one's duty to the State 
strengthened the individual. 

" A man must ride alternately on the horses of 
his private and public nature. . . . 

" Like vaulters in a circus round 
That leap from horse to horse, but never touch the ground." 

Though without skill in the weapons of debate, 
and most modest about his knowledge of practical 
affairs, he went to political meetings as a civic duty 
and a discipline of courage. In his boyhood, I am 



82 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

told by one of liis early friends, lie said he thought 
he could endure martyrdom, be burned at the 
stake. His younger brother, Charles, said, " Yes, 
but if any one spoke to you on the way there you 
would be so abashed you would n't have a word to 
say." Later some criticism to the same purpose 
was probably made by him, for my father writes in 
his journal in 1833 : — 

*' Were it not a heroic venture in me to insist on 
being a popular speaker and run full tilt against 
the Fortune who, with such beautiful consistency, 
shows evermore her back. Charles's naif censure 
last night provoked me to show him a fact appa- 
rently entirely new to him, that my entire success, 
such as it is, is composed wholly of particular fail- 
ures, every public work of mine of the least impor- 
tance having been, probably without exception, 
noted at the time as a failure. The only success 
(agreeably to common ideas) has been in the coun- 
try, and there founded on the false notion that 
here was a Boston preacher. I will take Mrs. Bar- 
bauld's line for my motto [of a brook], 

" And the more falls I get, move faster on." 

Partly for the rough training good for a scholar 
he went to political meetings, — always as a learner, 
to be sure, for so he went everywhere to his dying 
day, — but only as to details, for even his modesty 
did not accept the doctrine that the scholar, the 



THE SCHOLAR AS CITIZEN. 83 

"callow college doctrinaire," in the language of 
to-day, must learn his duty from the callous poli- 
tician or man of affairs. Let large issues of jus- 
tice and humanity arise, no deference was to be 
shown to the man of the world ; principles the 
scholar and poet knows better than he. 

" The vulgar politician, if he finds the honesty 
of a party or speaker stand in his way, disposes of 
them cheaply as the ' sentimental class.' " 

" The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise 
and to guide men by showing them facts amidst 
appearances. These being his functions, it becomes 
him to feel all confidence in himself and to defer 
never to the popular cry. He, and he only, knows 
the world. The world of any moment is the 
merest appearance. . . . Some ephemeral trade, or 
war, or man, is cried up by half mankind, and 
cried down by the other half, as if all depended 
on this particular up or down. . . . Let him 
not quit his belief that a pop-gun is a pop-gun, 
though the ancient and honorable of the earth 
should affirm it to be the crack of doom." 

" A scholar defending the cause of slavery, of 
arbitrary government, of monopoly, of the op- 
pressor, is a traitor to his profession. He has 
ceased to be a scholar. He is not company for 
clean people. The fears and agitations of those 
who watch the markets, the crops, the plenty or 
scarcity of money, or other superficial events, are 



V 



84 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

not for him. He knows the world is always equal 
to itself, that the forces which uphold and pervade 
it are eternal." . . . 

" The scholar is bound to stand for all the vir- 
tues and all the liberties, — liberty of trade, liberty 
of the press, liberty of religion, — and he should 
open all the prizes of success and all the roads of 
nature to free competition." 

^ " I have no knowledge of trade. There is not a 
sciolist who cannot shut my mouth and my under- 
standing by strings of facts that seem to prove the 
wisdom of tariffs. But my faith in freedom of 
trade, as the rule, returns always. If the Creator 
has made oranges, coffee and pineapples in Cuba 
and refused them to Massachusetts, I cannot see 
why we should put a fine on the Cubans for bring- 
ing these to us, — a fine so heavy as to enable 
Massachusetts men to build costly palm-houses and 
glass conservatories under which to coax these 
poor plants to ripen under our hard skies, and thus 
discourage the poor planter from sending them to 
gladden the very cottages here. We punish the 
planter there and punish the consumer here for 
adding these benefits to life. Tax opium, tax 
poisons, tax brandy, gin, wine, hasheesh, tobacco 
and whatever articles of pure luxury, but not 
healthy and delicious food." 

Whether native or acquired by training, Mr. 



EMERSON'S COURAGE. 85 

Emerson always had courage at the right time. 
He would have scorned to leave out, for fear of dis- 
turbing the feelings of his audience, any drastic 
lesson that he believed they needed to hear. When, 
in the winter of 1838, he had moved his cultivated 
Boston hearers with his lecture on Heroism, and 
carried them with him in full tide of sympathy 
with unselfish courage to the death, in causes for- 
lorn until the hero assumed them, he suddenly 
said, looking in their eyes : — 

"The day never shines in which this element 
may not work. ... It is but the other day that 
the brave Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of 
the mob for the rights of free speech and opin- 
ion, and died when it was better not to live." 

A cold shudder ran through the audience at the 
calm braving of public opinion, says an eye-witness. 
Heroes in the concrete are not in force in any lec- 
ture-room. 

So on his second visit to Europe in 1847-8, at 
a time when in England and in France the social 
fabric showed signs of crumbling under the pres- 
sure of excited masses of humanity, feeling that 
somehow they were living defrauded of their birth- 
rights of a fair and free chance in life by worn-out 
or corrupted institutions, and that the rich and for- 
tunate spent no thought on their condition, — Mr. 
Emerson, being invited to read lectures, wrote one 
upon Natural Aristocracy. He read this in Edin- 



86 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

boro' first, but later in London, and among his 
hearers were many noble and titled persons. He 
spoke of the duties, obligations, of the prosperous 
and favored classes, and how gladly mankind see 
an efficient, helpful man in high station : " But the 
day is darkened when the golden river runs down 
into mud, when genius grows idle and wanton and 
reckless of its fine duties of being Saint, Prophet, 
Inspirer to its humble fellows, baulks their respect 
and confounds their understanding with silly ex- 
travagances." He told how much even of folly 
and vice the populace will forgive to such as will 
do substantial public or private service after their 
kind, and then said : — 

"But if those who merely sit in their places and 
are not, like them, able ; if the dressed and per- 
fumed gentleman, who serves the people in no wise 
and adorns them not, is not even not afraid of 
them ; if such a one go about to set ill examples 
and corrupt them, who shall blame them if they 
burn his barns, insult his children, assail his per- 
son and express their unequivocal indignation and 
contempt ? He eats their bread, he does not scorn 
to live by their labor, — and after breakfast he can- 
not remember that there are human beings." 

He records that, soon after, Lord called on 

him at his lodgings and " hoped I would leave out 
that passage if I repeated the lecture." His only 
comment in his journal is, "Aristocracy is always 



THE CAUSE OF FREEDOM. 87 

timid." Had he been speaking to the revolution- 
ists, it is very certain that he would have used no 
expressions to excite them to violence ; but this les- 
son was written for the aristocracy of England, 
and he respected them too much to offer them pap 
for medicine. 

To all meetings held in Concord for the cause 
of Freedom, spiritual or corporal, he felt bound 
to give the sanction of his presence whether the 
speakers were good or bad ; he officially welcomed 
Kossuth and his Hungarian exiles ; he entertained 
John Brown at his house and gave largely from 
his, at that time very limited, means, to the fund 
for the furtherance and arming of the Kansas 
" Free State " immigration. 

January 1, 1861. 

Journal. "The furious slave-holder does not 
see that the one thing he is doing by night and by 
day is to destroy slavery. They who help and they 
who hinder are all equally diligent in hastening its 

downfall. Blessed be the inevitabilities. 

• •_. .'. • . • • 

" Do the duty of the hour. Just now the supreme 
public duty of all thinking men is to assert free- 
dom. Go where it is threatened and say ' I am 
for it and do not wish to live in the world a mo- 
ment longer than it exists.' " 

At this time, just before the war, the darkest 



88 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

Lour before the dawn of healthy and patriotic feel- 
ing, he went, invited by Wendell Phillips, to the 
anti-slavery meeting in Boston, which, it was known, 
the mob had determined to break up. He stood 
up calmly before the howling and jeering throng of 
well-dressed Bostonians who would save the Union 
with slavery, and silence the troublesome fanatics 
who would not have the Northern conscience put 
under Southern rule, — and spoke, but his words 
were drowned in the uproar. He looked them in 
the face and withdrew. When at last the dragon's 
teeth sprang up, he could not feel the war as a 
cruel Nemesis, but as a just and helpful one, recall- 
ing the lost manliness to a people and replacing 
materialism and scepticism by a high faith. His 
instincts were against violence, but he always be- 
lieved that it should be held as a last reserve. 

1850. 

Journal. " Yes, the terror and repudiation of 
war and of capital punishment may be a form of 
materialism . . . and show that all that engages 
you is what happens to men's bodies." 

In the journals of the war time are everywhere 
headings, " Benefits of the War," and the like, 
and he cheerfully writes : — 

"Certain it is that never before since I read 
newspapers has the morale played so large a part 
in them as now." 



THE WAR. 89 

On returning from some occasion where a cler- 
gyman had unsatisfactorily preached and prayed 
about the war, he says : — 

" Yet I felt while he spoke that it was easy, or 
at least possible, to open to the audience the thesis 
which he mouthed upon, how the Divine order 
' pays ' the country for the sacrifices it has made, 
and makes in the war. War ennobles the country ; 
searches it ; fires it ; acquaints it with its resources ; 
turns it away from false alliances, vain hopes and 
theatric attitude ; puts it on its mettle, — ' in our- 
selves our safety must be sought ; ' — gives it scope 
and object ; concentrates history into a year ; in- 
vents means ; systematizes everything. We began 
the war in vast confusion : when we end it all 
will be system." 

He stood for greater freedom in the act of wor- 
ship, for a freer thought and expression than Amer- 
ican literature, — prose or poetry, — had yet known, 
for the emancipation of the poor black, yet without 
undue severity to the planter, who found himself at 
birth, like his slave, entangled in this institution, 
for removal of oppressive disabilities from women, 
for greater freedom and scope in university educa- 
tion, for purer methods in politics and trade, at a 
time when to espouse these causes was to incur dis- 
approval or ridicule or enmity from most persons 
even in New England : even well-wishers smiled 
and said his teachings were visionary and his ideas 



90 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

unpractical. Were they so, or had he a better eye 
than these persons for the perspective of events, and 
the great roundness of the world, while they only 
noticed the trivial slopes on which they for the mo- 
ment travelled ? " Drawing," he said, " is a good 
eye for distances, and what else is wisdom but a good 
eye for distances, and time is only more or less 
acceleration of mental processes." And so in mere 
worldly wisdom he proved wiser than many church- 
men and politicians arid practical men of his day, 
who saw but five years before them, while he saw 
more ; for in the fifty years that he lived after part- 
ins: with his church he saw the causes for which he 
had stood with a few other scholars and independent 
thinkers and believers in the Higher Law, become 
the accepted creeds of those who had disapproved 
or smiled compassionately, and thus his early word 
of encouragement to the scholar in 1837 became 
exactly fulfilled for himself : " If a single man 
plant himself indomitably on his instincts and 
there abide, the world will come round to him." 

In 1842 I find that Mr. Emerson was associated 
with Mr. Reuben N. Rice (who then kept the 
Green Store on the common) and Mr. A. G. Fay 
as a director of the Concord Athenaeum, a sort of 
Reading Room where for a small fee citizens could 
have access to a number of newspapers and maga- 
zines which, but for such an institution, would 



FIRES IN THE WOODS. 91 

never have come within the reach of most of them. 
He joined the Fire Association, and the leathern 
buckets and baize bag always hung over the stairs 
in the side entry, but the introduction of the hand- 
engines and organization of the Fire Department 
rendered them obsolete, and within my recollection 
they were hardly taken down. He went in the 
neighborly fashion of those days to fires in the 
woods, and fought fire with his pine bough (appro- 
priate weapon for this lover of the pine) side by 
side with his neighbors. 

He had nothing of the military instinct, and 
had availed himself of the benefit of clergy, so to 
speak, to avoid it, for in his diary, speaking of the 
daily need of yeoman's service from every one, he 
says : " Condition, your private condition of riches 
or talents or seclusion, — what difference does that 
make ? As a man that once came to summon my 
brother William and me to train replied to the 
excuse that we were the instructors of youth, — 
' Well, and I am a watchmaker ! ' " 

But strangely, from the very fact of conscious- 
ness of lack in this direction, he admired it in 
others. Any practical or executive talent in how- 
ever humble a sphere, even of cowherd or stable- 
keeper, commanded his respect, but he took inter- 
est in great soldiers, read all the memoirs of 
Napoleon, and quotes him as often perhaps as 
any historical character. His explanation is sym- 
bolic. 



92 EMERSON IN CONCORD, 

" What is the meaning of this invincible respect 
for war here in the triumphs of our commercial 
civilization, that we can never quite smother the 
trumpet and the drum ? How is it that the sword 
runs away with all the fame from the spade and 
the wheel ? Why, but because courage never loses 
its high price ? Why, but because we wish to see 
those to whom existence is most adorned and at- 
tractive foremost to peril it for their object, and 
ready to answer for their actions with their life ? " ^ 

Journal. "The military eye which I meet so 
often, darkly sparkling now under clerical, now 
under rustic brows — for example, Robert Bartlett, 
William Channing, and our William Shepard here ; 
the city of Lacedaemon and the poem of Dante, 
which seems to me a city of Lacedaemon turned 
into verses." 

« October 19, 1839. 

" Another day : and hark. New Day, they batter 
the grey cheek of thy morning with booming of 
cannon, and now with lively clatter of bells and 
whooping of all the village boys. An unwonted 
holiday in our quiet meadows and sandy valleys 
and Cornwallis must surrender to-day .^ Without 

^ Essay on Aristocracy in Lectures and Biographical Sketches. 

^ At musters in New England at this epoch an important feature 
was a sham-fight ending in a representation of the surrender by 
Lord Cornwallis to Washington. These heroes were represented 
in scarlet and blue-and-buff uniforms respectively, with powdered 



THE CORNWALLIS. 93 

sympathy with the merry crowd, the pale student 
must yet listen and perchance even go abroad to 
beg a look at the fun." 

But in the evening the tale ran differently : 
" And so I went to the Sham-Fight and saw the 
whole show with pleasure. The officer instantly 
appears through all this masquerade and buffoonery. 
I thought when I first went to the field that it was 
the high tide of nonsense, and indeed the rag-tag 
and bob-tail of the County were there in all the 
wigs, old hats and aged finery of the last genera- 
tions. Then the faces were like the dresses, — 
such exaggerated noses, chins and mouths, that one 
could not reconcile them with any other dress than 
that frippery they wore. Yet presently Nature 
broke out in her old beauty and strength through 
all this scurf. The man of skill makes his jacket 
invisible. Two or three natural soldiers among 
these merry captains played out their habitual 

wigs and cocked hats, belo^y which were seen the brown or rubi- 
cund features of rustic colonels. 

In the Biglow Papers the disenchanted private in the Mexican 
War writes home to his friend, — 

'• Recollec' what fun we had 

You an' I an' Ezry Hollis 
Down to Waltham plains last Fall 

A havin' the Cornwallis ? 
This sort o' thing ain't jes^ like that," etc., 

and even the moral Hozey Biglow admits that " there is fun at a 
Cornwallis." 



94 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

energy so well that order and reason appeared as 
much at home in a farce as in a legislature. Mean- 
time the buffoons of a sham-fight are soon felt to 
be as impertinent there as elsewhere. This organ- 
ization suffices to bring pioneers, soldiers, outlaws 
and homicides distinct to view, and I saw Wash- 
ington, Napoleon and Murat come strongly out of 
the mottled crew." 

Musters of those days presented still another 
aspect which most of us remember. Bacchus di- 
vided the honors with Mars. 

" Fools and clowns and sots make the fringe of 
every one's tapestry of life, and give a certain real- 
ity to the picture. What could we do in Concord 
without Bigelow's and Wesson's bar-rooms and 
their dependencies ? What without such fixtures 
as Uncle Sol and old Moore who sleeps in Dr. 
Hurd's barn, and the red Charity-house over the 
brook? Tragedy and comedy always go hand in 
hand." 

Even in noisy politics he liked to find a deeper 
cause. 

1840. 

Journal. " The simplest things are always bet- 
ter than curiosities. The most imposing part of 
this Harrison Celebration of the Fourth of July in 
Concord, as in Baltimore, was this ball, twelve or 
thirteen feet in diameter, which, as it mounts the 
little heights and descends the little slopes of the 



THE HARRISON CAMPAIGN. 96 

road, draws all eyes with a certain sublime move- 
ment, especially as the imagination is incessantly 
addressed with its political significancy. So the 
Log Cabin is a lucky watchword." 

« 1840. 

" Sept. 11. See how fond of symbols the people 
are. See the great ball which they roll, from Bal- 
timore to Bunker Hill. See Lynn in a Shoe, and 
Salem in a Ship. They say and think that they 
hate poetry and all sorts of moonshine ; and they 
are all the while mystics and transcendentalists." 

1859. 
Journal. " There is no strong performance 
without a little fanaticism in the performer. That 
field yonder did not get such digging, ditching, 
filling and planting for any pay. A fanaticism 
lucky for the owner did it. James B. opened m}'' 
hay as fiercely on Sunday as on Monday. Neither 
can any account be given of the fervid work in 
M. M. E.'s manuscripts but the vehement religion 
which would not let her sleep nor sit, but write, 
write, night and day, year after year. . . . Un- 
weariable fanaticism which, if it could give account 
of itself, is the troll which by night 

" ' Threshed the corn that ten day-laborers could not end.' 

Gushing and Banks and Wilson are its victims, 
and by means of it vanquishers of men. But they 



96 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

whose eyes are prematurely opened with broad 
common-sense views are hopeless dilettanti and 
must obey these madmen." 

" 1841. 

" E. H. repeats Colonel Shattuck's toast to poor 
: ' The Orator of the Day ; his subject de- 
serves the attention of every agriculturist.' It does 
honor to Colonel Shattuck. I wish the great lords 
and diplomatists at Cambridge had only as much 
ingenuity and respect for truth. The speeches 
froze me to my place. At last Bancroft thawed 
the ice and released us, and I inwardly thanked 
him." 

« 1834. 

Journal. " Pray Heaven that you may have a 
sympathy with all sorts of excellence, even with 
those antipodal to your own. If any eye rests on 
this page, let him know that he who blotted it could 
not go into conversation with any person of good 
understanding without being presently gravelled. 
The slightest question of his most familiar proposi- 
tion disconcerted him, — eyes, face and understand- 
ing, beyond recovery. Yet did he not the less 
respect and rejoice in this daily gift of vivacious 
common sense which was so formidable to him." 

In the early days of Mr. Emerson's Concord 
housekeeping it took from two to three hours to 
reach Boston by the stage which lumbered by his 



CONCORD STAGE COACH. 97 

house through dust or mud, and these long rides 
gave greater opportunity for forming acquaintance 
with one's neighbors than the comparatively short 
and unsociable ride in the seat of a railroad car. 
Lawyers going to court, ministers exchanging with 
their country brethren, traders going to supply 
their miscellaneous country-stores, ladies going vis- 
iting or to see the sights of the city were there. 
Somebody always knew somebody, and thus cheer- 
ful conversation was sure to be set agoing.^ 

1841. 
Journal. " I frequently find the best part of my 
ride in the Concord coach from my house to Win- 
throp Place to be in Prince Street, Charter Street, 
Ann Street and the like places at the North End of 
Boston. The deshabille of both men and women, 
their unrestrained attitudes and manners make 
pictures greatly more interesting than the clean- 
shaved and silk-robed procession in Washington 
and Tremont Streets. I often see that the attitudes 
of both men and women engaged in hard work are 
more picturesque than any which art and study 
could contrive, for the Heart is in these first. I say 
picturesque, because when I pass these groups I 

^ " The Goneord Coach leaves Earl's Tavern, 36 Hanover Street 
[Boston], every morning at 6 : every afternoon at 3 : and on Tues- 
day, Thursday and Saturday at 10, A. m." Extract from Mr. 
Emerson's letter to a friend in 1842. 



98 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

instantly know whence all the fine pictures I have 
seen had their origin : I feel the painter in me ; 
these are the traits which make us feel the force 
and eloquence of form and the sting of color. But 
the painter is only in me and does not come to the 
fingers' ends." 

He liked to talk with horsemen and stagfe-driv- 
ers, and enjoyed their racy vernacular and pictu- 
resque brag as much as the cautious understate- 
ment of the farmer. 

On his walks he fell in with pot-hunters and 
fishermen, wood-choppers and drivers of cattle, and 
liked to exchange a few words with them, and he 
always observed the old-time courtesy of the road, 
the salutation to the passer-by, even if a stranger. 

1837. 

Journal. " Do not charge me w^ith egotism and 
presumption. I see with awe the attributes of the 
farmers and villagers whom you despise. A man 
saluted me to-day in a manner which at once 
stamped him for a theist, a self-respecting gentle- 
man, a lover of truth and virtue. How venerable 
are the manners often of the poor ! " 

" How expressive is form ! I see by night the 
shadow of a poor woman against a window curtain 
that instantly tells a story of so much meekness, 
affection and labor as almost to draw tears." 



WHOLESOME LIFE. 99 

" 1841. 
" I went to the Rainers' concert last night in 
our Court House. When I heard them in Boston, 
I had some dreams about music ; last night — 
nothing. Last night I enjoyed the audience. I 
looked v/ith a great degree of pride and affection 
at the company of my townsmen and towns women, 
and dreamed of that kingdom and society of Love 
which we preach." 

"1846. 

" In the city of Makebelieve m a great ostenta- 
tion bolstered up on a great many small ostenta- 
tions. I think we escape something by living in 
the village. In Concord here there is some milk 
of life, we are not so raving-distracted with wind 
and dyspepsia. The mania takes a milder form. 
People go a-fishing and know the taste of their 
meat. They cut their own whippletree in the 
woodlot ; they know something practically of the 
sun and the east wind, of the underpinning and 
the roofing of the house, and the pan and mixture 
of the soils." 

To the shops, excepting that in which the post- 
office was kept, he • seldom went, unless to pay a 
bill ; though he looked sometimes with a longing 
eye at the group of village worthies exchanging 
dry remarks round the grocery stove, but he knew 
it was of no use for him to tarry, for the fact that 



100 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

he was scholar and clergyman would silence the 
oracles. 

1847. 

Journal. " I thought again of the avarice with 
which my man looks at the Insurance Office and 
would so fain be admitted to hear the gossip that 
goes forward there. For an hour to be invisible 
there and hear the best-informed men retail their 
information he would pay great prices, but every 
company dissolves at his approach. He so eager 
and they so coy. A covey of birds do not rise more 
promptly from the ground when he comes near than 
merchants, brokers, lawyers disperse before him. 
He went into the tavern, he looked into the win- 
dow of the grocery shop with the same covetous 
ears. They were so communicative, they laughed 
aloud, they whispered, they proclaimed aloud their 
sentiment ; he opened the door — and the conver- 
sation received about that time a check, and one 
after another went home. Boys and girls who had 
so much to say provoked scarcely less curiosity, 
and were equally inaccessible to the unmagnetic 
man." . . . 

" We want society on our own terms. Each man 
has facts that I want, and, though I talk with him, 
I cannot get at them for want of the clue. He 
does not know what to do with his facts : I know. 
If I could draw them from him, it must be with 
his keys, arrangements and reserves. Here is all 



OSMAN. 101 

Boston, — all railroads, all manufactures and trade, 
in the head of this well-informed merchant at my 
side. What would I not give for a peep at his 
rows and rows of facts. Here is Agassiz with 
his theory of anatomy and nature ; I am in his 
chamber, and I do not know what question to put. 
Here is Charles T. Jackson, whom I have known so 
long, who knows so much, and I have never been 
able to get anything truly valuable from him. 
Here is all Fourier in Brisbane's head ; all lan- 
guages in Kraitser's ; all Swedenborg in Reed's ; 
all the Revolution in old Adams's head ; all mod- 
ern Europe and America in John Quincy Adams's, 
and I cannot appropriate a fragment of all their 
experience. I would fain see their picture-books 
as they exist. Now if I could cast a spell on this 
man at my side and see his pictures without his in- 
tervention or organs, and, having learned that les- 
son, turn the spell on another, lift up the cover of 
another hive, and see the cells and suck the honey, 
and then another and so without limit — they were 
not the poorer and I were rich indeed. 

" The ring of Gyges prefigures this — society on 
our own terms. . . , 

" But Osman ^ answered and said, I do not know 
whether I have the curiosity you describe. I do 
not want the particulars which the merchant values, 

^ Osman represents in his writings not himself, but his better 
self ; an ideal man put in the same circumstances, /c x /, '2-'<3 



102 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

or the lawyer, or the artist, but only the inevitable 
results which he communicates to me in his manner 
and conduct and in the tone and purpose of his 
discourse." 

" 1837. 
" Perhaps in the village we have manners to 
paint which the city life does not know. Here we 
have Mr. S. who is man enough to turn away the 
butcher who cheats in weight, and introduce an- 
other butcher into town. The other neis^hbors 
could not take such a step. Here is Mr. E. who, 
when the Moderator of the Town meeting, is candi- 
date for representative, and so stands in the centre 
of the box inspecting each vote ; and each voter 
dares carry up a vote for the opposite candidate 
and put it in. There is the hero who will not sub- 
scribe to the flagstaff or the engine, though all say 
it is mean. There is the man who gives his dol- 
lar but refuses to give his name, though all the 
other contributors are set down. There is Mr. H. 
who never loses his spirits, though always in the 
minority, and though ' people behave as bad as if 
they were drunk,' he is just as determined in oppo- 
sition and just as cheerful as ever. Here is Mr. C. 
who says ' Honor bright,' and keeps it so. Here 
is Mr. S. who warmly assents to whatever proposi- 
tion you please to make ; and Mr. M. who roundly 
tells you he will have nothing to do with the thing. 
The high people in the village are timid, the low 



MILITIA COMPANIES. 103 

people are bold and nonchalant ; negligent too of 
each other's opposition, for they see the amount of 
it, and know its uttermost limits, which the more 
remote proprietor does not. Here too are not to 
be forgotten our two Companies, the Light Infantry 
and the Artillery, who brought up, one the Brigade 
Band, and one the Brass Band from Boston, set the 
musicians side by side under the great tree on the 
Common and let them play two tunes and jangle 
and drown each other and presently got the Com- 
panies into actual hustling and kicking. .... To 
show the force that is in you (whether you are a 
philosopher and call it heroism or are a farmer and 
call it pluck), you need not go beyond the tinman's 
shop on the first corner; nay, the first man you 
meet who bows to you may look you in the eye and 
call it out." 

"1843. 

"It is a compensation for their habitual mod- 
eration of nature in the Concord fields and the 
want of picturesque outlines, the ease of getting 
about. I long sometimes to have mountains, 
ravines and flumes, like that in Lincoln, New 
Hampshire, within reach of my eyes and feet ; but 
the thickets of the forest and the fatigue of moun- 
tains are spared me, and I go through Concord as 
through a park. 

" Concord is a little town, and yet has its honors. 
We get our handful of every ton that comes to the 



104 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

city. We have had our share of Everett and 
Webster, who have both spoken here ; so has 
Edward Taylor, so did George Bancroft, and Bron- 
son Alcott and Charles Lane, Garrison and Phil- 
lips the abolition orators. We have had our shows 
and processions, conjurers and bear-gardens, and 
here too came Herr Driesbach with his cats and 
snakes. 

" Hither come in summer the Penobscot Indians, 
and make baskets for us on the river-bank. Dr. 
Channing and Harriet Martineau were here, and 
what I think much more, my friends, — here were 
Aunt Mary, Ellen, Edward and Charles, here is 
Elizabeth Hoar : here have been or are Margaret 
Fuller, S. G. W. and A. W., C. S., C. K. N., 
George P. Bradford, EUery Channing, Nathaniel 
Hawthorne, Mrs. Ripley, Henry Thoreau and 
Elliot Cabot. In the old time, John Winthrop, 
John Eliot, Peter Bulkeley, then Whitfield, then 
Hancock, Adams and the college were here in 
1775. Kossuth spoke to us in the Court House 
in 1852. Agassiz, Greenough, Clough, Wyman, 
Hawthorne, Samuel Hoar, Thoreau, Newcomb, 
Lafayette." 

The presence of his brother Charles in Concord 
had much to do with my father's decision to come 
here. He was engaged to be married to Miss 
Elizabeth Hoar, lived with Mr. and Mrs. Emerson, 



CHARLES EMERSON'S DEATH. 105 

and was the life of the house, and they had added 
new rooms in joyful expectation that he would 
soon bring his bride to live with them ; and Ma- 
dam Emerson would have had the joy of having 
two sons, with their wives, under the same roof 
with her. But as Charles reached the age of thirty, 
the critical period which two of his brothers had 
hardly passed, and which had proved fatal to 
Edward, his delicate constitution gave way to 
exposure when in an overworked condition, and 
he died of quick consumption in May, 1836, but a 
few months before he was to have been married. 
Of him his grieving brother wrote : — 

" And here I am at home again. My brother, 
my friend, my ornament, my joy and pride has 
fallen by the wayside, — or rather has risen out of 
this dust. . . . Beautiful without any parallel in 
my experience of young men was his life ; happiest 
his death. Miserable is my own prospect from 
whom my friend is taken. ... I read now his 
pages, I remember all his words and motives with- 
out any pang, so healthy and humane a life it was, 
and not like Edward's, a tragedy of poverty and 
sickness tearing genius. ... I have felt in him 
the inestimable advantage, when God allows it, of 
finding a brother and a friend in one." 

In a letter to his brother William he says : — 



106 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

" Concord, May 15, 1836. 
. . . "At the church this morning, before the 
prayers, notes of the families were read [desiring 
the prayers of the congregation] and one from Dr. 
Ripley, and one, ' many young people, friends of 
the deceased, join in the same request.' As it was 
unusual it was pleasing. Mr. Goodwin preached 
in the morning from the text, ' Who knoweth the 
time of his death ? ' and made affectionate and 
sympathetic remembrance of Charles. Grand- 
father, [Dr. Ripley] in the afternoon, called him 
by name in his own rugged style of Indian elo- 
quence. ' This event seems to me,' he said, ' loud 
and piercing, like thunder and lightning. While 
many aged and burdensome are spared, this be- 
loved youth is cut down in the morning.' " 

The coming to Concord of Mrs. Ripley, always a 
dear and honored friend, and the frequent presence 
of her brother, Mr. George P. Bradford, a man 
whom Mr. Emerson always held in very affection- 
ate regard; later the coming of Mr. Alcott, first 
brought by Mr. Bradford as a visitor in 1835, 
then of Mr. William EUery Channing and of Mr. 
Hawthorne, and his discovery of Henry Thoreau, 
then a youth just out of college, the easy access of 
friends, known and unknown, through the building 
of the Fitchburg Railroad, — all these circum- 
stances heightened the value of his home in his 



ALCOTT. 107 

eyes. I trust that I shall not overstep the bounds 
of propriety in the following brief mention of 
some of my father's nearer friends. 

For Mr. Alcott's thought and lofty aims he had 
the very highest respect, and he always declared 
that conversation with Mr. Alcott (alone in the 
study) had been very inspiring to him. Early in 
their acquaintance he writes of him to his friend, 
Eev. William H. Furness : — 

" Concord, October, 1837. 
..." I shall always love you for loving Alcott. 
He is a great man : the God with the herdsmen 
of Admetus. I cannot think you know him now, 
when I remember how long he has been here, for 
he grows every month. His conversation is sub- 
lime. Yet when I see how he is underestimated 
by cultivated people, I fancy none but I have heard 
him talk." 

In his journal for 1856 he says : " The comfort 
of Alcott's mind is the connection in which he 
sees whatever he sees. He is never dazzled by a 
spot of color or a gleam of light to value that thing 
by itself, but for ever and ever is prepossessed by 
the undivided one behind it and all. I do not 
know where to find in men or books a mind so val- 
uable to faith. His own invariable faith inspires 
faith in others. . . . For every opinion or sentence 



108 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

of Alcott a reason may be sought and found, not 
in his will or fancy, but in the necessity of Nature 
itself, which has daguerred that fatal impression 
on his susceptible soul. He is as good as a lens or 
a mirror, a beautiful susceptibility, every impres- 
sion on which is not to be reasoned against or de- 
rided, but to be accounted for, and, until accounted 
for, registered as an addition to our catalogue of 
natural facts. There are defects in the lens and 
errors of refraction and position, etc., to be allowed 
for, and it needs one acquainted with the lens by 
frequent use to make these allowances ; but 't is 
the best instrument I have ever met with." 

He deplored the uncertainty of his inspiration 
in public conversation, and felt that the man he 
knew and prized was not to be found in any of his 
writings. His value for Mr. Alcott's high plane 
of thought and life never, however, blinded him to 

his limitations. 

1857. 

Journal. " Once more for Alcott it may be said 
that he is sincerely and necessarily engaged to his 
task, and not wilfully or ostentatiously or pecuni- 
arily." 

Mr. Hawthorne always interested my father by 
his fine personality, but the gloomy and uncanny 
twilight atmosphere of his books was one in which 
Mr. Emerson could not breathe, and he never could 



HAWTHORNE. 109 

read far. But he believed that the man was bet- 
ter than his books, and Hawthorne's death cut off 
hopes which he had cherished of a future friend- 
ship. In a letter to Mrs. Hawthorne soon after 
her husband's death, he says : — 

« July 11, 1864. 

..." I have had my own pain in the loss of 
your husband. He was always a mine of hope to 
me, and I promised myself a rich future in achiev- 
ing at some day, when we should both be less en- 
gaged to tyrannical studies and habitudes, an un- 
reserved intercourse with him. I thought I could 
well wait his time and mine for what was so well 
worth waiting. And as he always appeared to rae 
superior to his own performances, I counted this 
yet untold force an insurance of a long life. 
Though sternly disappointed in the manner and 
working, I do not hold the guaranty less real." ^ 

^ Mr. Hawthorne once broke through his hermit usage, and 
honored Miss Ellen Emerson, the friend of his daughter Una, with 
a formal call on a Sunday evening. It was the only time, I think, 
that he ever, came to the house except when persuaded to come in 
for a few moments on the rare occasions when he walked with my 
father. On this occasion he did not ask for either Mr. or Mrs. 
Emerson, but announced that his call was upon Miss Ellen. Un- 
fortunately she had gone to bed, but he remained for a time talk- 
ing with my sister Edith and me, the schoolmates of his children. 
To cover his shyness he took up a stereoscope on the centre table 
and began to look at the pictures. After looking at them for a 
time he asked where these views were taken. We told him they 
were pictures of the Concord Court and Town-houses, the Common 



110 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

The history of Mr. Emerson's first acquaintance 
with Mr. Thoreau is this. When the former was 
delivering a new lecture in Concord, Miss Helen 
Thoreau said to Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Emerson's sis- 
ter, "There is a thought almost identical with 
that in Henry's journal," which she soon after 
brought to Mrs. Brown. The latter carried it to 
Mr. Emerson, who was interested, and asked her to 
bring this youth to see him. She did, and thus 
began a relation that lasted all their lives of strong 
respect and even affection, but of a Roman char- 
acter.^ 

In 1838 he writes : " I delight much in my 
young friend who seems to have as free and erect 
a mind as any I have ever met." 

Mr. Thoreau stood the severest test of friend- 
ship, having been once an inmate of Mr. Emer- 
son's house for two years. He was as little troub- 
lesome a member of the household, with his habits 
of plain living and high thinking, as could well 
have been, and in the constant absences of the 
master of the house in his lecturing trips, the pres- 
ence there of such a friendly and sturdy inmate 
was a great comfort. He was " handy " with tools, 

and the Mill-dam, on hearing which he expressed some surprise and 
interest, but evidently was as unfamiliar with the centre of the 
village where he had lived for years as a deer or a wood-thrush 
would be. He walked through it often on his way to the cars, 
but was too shy or too rapt to know what was there. 

^ Mr. Thoreau was fifteen years younger than Mr. Emerson. 



THOREAU. Ill 

and there was no limit to his usefulness and inge- 
nuity about house and garden. To animals he was 
as humane as a woman, He was by no means un- 
social, but a kindly and affectionate person, espe- 
cially to children, whom he could endlessly amuse 
and charm in most novel and healthful ways. 
With grown persons he had tact and high cour- 
tesy, though with reserve. But folly or pretence 
or cant or subserviency excited his formidable at- 
tack, and, like Lancelot, he would 

" Strike down the lusty and long practised knight 
And let the younger and unskilled go by 
To win his honor and to make his name." 

But also with those whom he honored and valued 
like his friend Emerson, a certain combative in- 
stinct and love of paradox on his part often inter- 
fered with the fullest enjoyment of conversation, 
so that his friend says of him, " Thoreau is, with 
difficulty, sweet." In spite of these barriers of tem- 
perament, my father always held him, as a man, in 
the highest honor. He delighted in being led to 
the very inner shrines of the wood-gods by this 
man, clear-eyed and true and stern enough to be 
trusted with their secrets, who filled the portrait of 
the Forest-seer of the Woodnotes, although those 
lines were written before their author came to 
know Thoreau. 

In 1852, writing to a friend whom he would in- 
duce to come to Concord, Mr. Emerson says : — 



112 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

" If Corinna or tlie Delphic Sibyl were here, 
would you not come breathless with speed ? Yet I 
told you that Elizabeth Hoar was here, and yet 
you come not. If old Pan were here, you would 
come, and we have young Pan under another name, 
whom you shall see, and hear his reeds if you 
tarry not." And earlier, the journal celebrates 
Thoreau, this invaluable new-found guide : — 

" June e, 1S4:1. 

" I am sometimes discontented with my house, 
because it lies on a dusty road and with its sills 
and cellar almost in the water of the meadow. But 
when I creep out of it into the night or the morn- 
ing and see what majestic and what tender beauties 
daily wrap me in their bosom, how near to me is 
every transcendent secret of Nature's love and re- 
ligion, I see how indifferent it is where I eat and 
sleep. This very street of hucksters and taverns 
the moon will transform into a Palmyra, for she is 
the apologist of all apologists and will kiss the elm- 
trees alone, and hides every meanness in a silver- 
edged darkness. Then the good river - god has 
taken the form of my valiant Henry Thoreau here, 
and introduced me to the riches of his shadowy 
starlit, moonlit stream, a lovely new world lying as 
close and yet as unknown to this vulgar trite one 
of streets and shops, as death to life, or poetry to 
prose. Through one field we went to the boat, and 



THOREAU. 113 

then left all time, all science, all history behind us 
and entered into nature with one stroke of a pad- 
dle. Take care, good friend ! I said, as I looked 
West into the sunset overhead and underneath, and 
he, with his face towards me, rowed towards it, — 
Take care : you know not what you do, dipping 
your wooden oar into this enchanted liquid, painted 
with all reds and purples and yellows, which glows 
under and behind you. Presently this glory faded 
and the stars came and said. Here we are. . . . 
These beguiling stars, soothsaying, flattering, per- 
suading, who, though their promise was never yet 
made good in human experience, are not to be con- 
tradicted, not to be insulted, nay, not even to be 
disbelieved by us. All experience is against them, 
yet their word is Hope and shall still forever leave 
experience a liar." 

The year after his friend's death he read his 
manuscript journals, submitted to him by Miss 
Sophia Thoreau, with great pleasure and almost 
surprise, and wrote in his own : — 

« 1863. 

" In reading Henry Thoreau's journal I am very 
sensible of the vigor of his constitution. That 
oaken strength which I noted whenever he walked 
or worked or surveyed wood-lots, the same unhesi- 
tating hand with which a field-laborer accosts a 
piece of work which I should shun as a waste of 



114 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

strength, Henry shows in his literary task. He 
has muscle, and ventures on and performs feats 
which I am forced to decline. In reading him I 
find the same thoughts, the same spirit that is in 
me, but he takes a step beyond and illustrates by 
excellent images that which I should have conveyed 
in a sleepy generalization. 'T is as if I went into 
a gymnasium and saw youths leap and climb and 
swing with a force unapproachable, though their 
feats are only continuations of my initial grap- 
plings and jumps." 

The charge of imitating Emerson, too often made 
against Thoreau, is idle and untenable, though un- 
fortunately it has received some degree of sanction 
in high quarters. Surely a much more generous 
and less superficial criticism was due from such a 
man and writer as Mr. Lowell to this brave and 
upright man, and, in his best moods, earnest and 
religious writer, than he received in the essay on 
Thoreau. The scant page, at the end of the chap- 
ter, of really just and high praise in essential points, 
and for lofty aim and unusual quality of mind, 
comes all too late to undo the effect on the reader 
of ten pages in which Mr. Lowell has used his fine 
wit in severe -criticism, often on trifling matters 
and even on a low plane, leaving Thoreau under 
the imputations of indolence and selfishness, to 
pass over the sweeping assertions that he had no 



CHANNING. 115 

humor, an unhealthy mind, and discovered noth- 
ing. 

It may well be that the young Thoreau in his 
close association, under the same roof with Mr. 
Emerson, at a time when he had had few culti- 
vated companions, may have unconsciously acquired 
a trick of voice, or even of expression, and it would 
have been strange if the village youth should not 
have been influenced by the older thinker for a 
time, but legitimately, as Raphael by Perugino. 
But this is the utmost that can be admitted by any 
person who really knew the man. Thoreau was 
incapable of conscious imitation. His faults, if 
any, lay in exactly the opposite direction. Both 
men were fearless thinkers, at war indeed against 
many of the same usages, and interested in the 
emancipation of the individual. Both went to 
great Nature to be refreshed and inspired. 

There was another lover of Nature, a poet who 
should have been an artist, who while talking of 
poetry carried his friend, with a sure eye for the 
very flowering of the beauty of each season, to the 
very point at which alone it could be rightly seen, 
and on the halcyon days. I will give here a chron- 
icle of one of many rambles on auspicious Satur- 
day afternoons. 

October 28, 1848. 

Journal. " Another walk with EUery Channing 
well worth commemoration, if that were possible ; 



116 EMERSOJSr IN CONCORD. 

but no pen could write what we saw ; it needs tlie 
pencils of all the painters that ever existed to aid 
the description. We went to White Pond, a pretty 
little Indian bath, lonely now as Walden once was ; 
we could almost see the sachem in his canoe in a 
shadowy cove. But making the circuit of the lake 
on the shore, we came at last to see some marvel- 
lous reflections of the colored woods in the water, 
of such singular beauty and novelty that they held 
us fast to the spot almost to the going down of the 
sun. The water was very slightly rippled, which 
took the proper character from the pines, birches 
and few oaks which composed the grove ; and the 
sub-marine wood seemed all made of Lombardy 
poplar with such delicious green, stained by gleams 
of mahogany from the oaks and streaks of white 
from the birches, every moment growing more 
excellent ; it was the world seen through a prism, 
and set Ellery on wonderful Lucretian theories of 
' law and design.' 

" Ellery as usual found the place with excellent 
judgment ' where your house should be set,' leav- 
ing the wood -paths as they were, which no art 
could make over ; and, after leaving the pond, and 
a certain dismal dell, whither a man might go to 
shoot owls or to do self-murder, we struck across 
an orchard to a steep hill of the right New Hamp- 
shire slope, newly cleared of wood, and came pres- 
ently into rudest woodland landscapes, unknown, 



WALK WITH CUANNING. 117 

undescribed and hitherto unwalhed by us Saturday 
afternoon professors. The sun was setting behind 
terraces of pines disposed in groups unimaginable 
by Downings or Loudon s, or Capability Browns, 
but we kept our way and fell into the Duganne 
trail, as we had already seen the glimpse of his 
cabin in the edge of the barbarous district we had 
traversed. Through a clump of apple-trees, over 
a long ridge with fair outsight of the river, and 
across the Nut-Meadow brook, we came out upon 
the banks of the river just below James Brown's. 
EUery proposed that we should send the Horticul- 
tural Society our notes, * Took an apple near the 
White Pond fork of the Duganne trail, an apple 
of the Beware - of- this variety, a true Touch - me - 
if- you - dare, — Seek - no -further - of- this. We 
had much talk of books and lands and arts and 
farmers. We saw the original tumulus or first bar- 
row which the fallen pine-tree makes with its up- 
turned roots, and which after a few years precisely 
resembles a man's grave. We talked of the great 
advantage which he has who can turn a verse over 
all the human race. I read in Wood's "Athense 
Oxoniensis " a score of pages of learned nobodies, 
of whose once odoriferous reputations not a trace 
remains in the air, and then I came to the name of 
some Carew, Herrick, Suckling, Chapman, whose 
name is as fresh and modern as those of our friends 
in Boston and London, and all because they could 



118 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

turn a verse. Only write a dozen lines, and rest 
on your oars forever ; you are dear and necessary 
to the human race and worth all the old trumpery 
Plutarch s and Platos and Bacons of the world. . . . 
EUery said he had once fancied that there were 
some amateur trades, as politics, but he found there 
were none ; these too were fenced by Whig bar- 
ricades. Even walking could not be done by ama- 
teurs, but by professors only. In walking with 
Ellery you shall always see what was never before 
shown to the eye of man. And yet for how many 
ages of lonely days has that pretty wilderness of 
White Pond received the sun and clouds into its 
transparencies and woven each day new webs of 
birch and pine, shooting into wilder angles and 
more fantastic crossing of these coarse threads, 
which, in the water, have such momentary ele- 
gance." 

A remark of this friend, as they voyaged on 

Concord River, seems to have given the hint for 

the verse, — 

" Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, 
Or dip thy paddle in the lake, 
But it carves the bow of beauty there 

And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake." 

1846. 
Journal. " ' As for beauty, I need not look be- 
yond an oar's length for my fill of it '; I do not 



THE HOAR FAMILY. 119 

know whether he used the expression with design 
or no, but my eye rested on the charming play of 
light on the water which he was striking with his 
paddle. I fancied I had never seen such color, 
such transparency, such eddies: it was the hue 
of Rhine wines, it was jasper and verde-antique, 
topaz and chalcedony, it was gold and green and 
chestnut and hazel in bewitching succession and 
relief without cloud or confusion." 

With Judge Hoar Mr. Emerson had from the 
early days of his Concord residence the bond of 
their common sister (for as such my father always 
regarded Miss Elizabeth Hoar), and this tie the 
Judge strengthened by his character and by his con- 
stant friendship, shown at need by acts of great 
kindness. His father, the Squire, as he was called 
in all this region, whose austere uprightness called 
to mind the image of a senator of Rome in her early 
days, was regarded with reverence and high esteem 
by Mr. Emerson, although the two men in their 
tastes and sympathies were very wide apart. 

Journal. " The beauty of character takes long 
time to discover. Who that should come to Con- 
cord but would laugh if you told him that Samuel 
Hoar was beautiful ? Yet I thought one day, when 
he passed, that the rainbow, geometry itself, is 
not handsomer than that walking sincerity, strait 
bounded as it is." 



120 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

Over the Boston road in the coach, and later 
over the railway, came many valued friends, some 
of whom prized the conversation with their host, 
but not the country scenes or friends. But I must 
mention Agassiz, whose healthy, manly and affec- 
tionate presence was always as agreeable as his 
wonderful knowledge, on the many occasions when 
he came to lecture, — always refusing to receive 
the smallest compensation from the Lyceum, say- 
ing that he really came to visit his friend, and the 
lecture was by the way. This kindly man of sim- 
ple bearing stood one of Mr. Emerson's tests. He 
writes of him : — 

" He is a man to be thankful for, always cordial, 
full of facts, with imsleeping observation and per- 
fectly communicative. . . . What a harness of 
buckram city life and wealth puts on our poets and 
literary men. Alcott complained of lack of simpli- 
city in A , B , C and D (late 

visitors from the city), and Alcott is right touch- 
stone to test them, litmus to detect the acid. 
Agassiz is perfectly accessible ; has a brave man- 
liness which can meet a peasant, a mechanic, or a 
fine gentleman with equal fitness." 

There were among Mr. Emerson's acquaintance 
two men of business, always loyal friends to him, 
for whose powers and resources and virtues he had 
great regard. The first, his early parishioner, Mr. 
Abel Adams, who died in 1869 full of years and 



JOHN MURRAY FORBES. 121 

virtues, is mentioned several times in this narra- 
tive. Of the other, Mr. John M. Forbes, I cannot 
deny myself the pleasure of inserting his friend's 
notice in his journal, on a return from a visit to 
him in his island home in Buzzard's Bay during 
the last year of the war. 

" Ocioher 12, 1864. 

" Returned from Naushon, whither I went on 
Saturday, 8th, with Professor of Oxford Uni- 
versity, Mr. , , and . Mr. Forbes 

at Naushon is the only ' Squire ' in Massachu- 
setts, and no nobleman ever understood or per- 
formed his duties better. I divided my admiration 
between the landscape of Naushon and him. He 
is an American to be proud of. Never was such 
force, good meaning, good sense, good action com- 
bined with such domestic lovely behavior, and such 
modesty and persistent preference of others. Wher- 
ever he moves, he is the benefactor. It is of course 
that he should shoot well, ride well, sail well, ad- 
minister railroads well, carve well, keep house well, 
but he was the best talker also in the company, 
with the perpetual practical wisdom, seeing always 
the working of the thing, — with the multitude 
and distinction of his facts (and one detects contin- 
ually that he has had a hand in everything that has 
been done), and in the temperance with which he 
parries all offence, and opens the eyes of his in- 
terlocutor without contradicting him. 1 have been 



122 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

proud of my countrymen, but I think this is a good 
country that can breed such a creature as John M. 
Forbes. There was something dramatic in the 
conversation of Monday night between Professor 

, Forbes and , chiefly ; the Englishman 

being evidently alarmed at the near prospect of 
the retaliation of America's standing in the identi- 
cal position soon in which England now and lately 
has stood to us, and playing the same part towards 
her. Forbes, a year ago, was in Liverpool and 
London entreating them to respect their own neu- 
trality, and disallow the piracy and the blockade- 
running, and hard measure to us in their colonial 
ports, etc. And now, so soon, the parts were en- 
tirely reversed and Professor was showing us 

the power and irritability of England and the cer- 
tainty that war would follow if we should \m\di 
and arm a ship in one of our ports, send her out to 
sea, and at sea sell her to their enemy, which would 
be a proceeding strictly in accordance with her 
present proclaimed law of nations. . . . When the 
American Government urged England to make a 
new treaty to adjust and correct this anomalous 
rule, the English Government refused, and 't is 
only ignorance that has prevented the Rebel Con- 
federacy from availing themselves of it. 

" At Naushon I recall what Captain John Smith 
said of the Bermudas, and I think as well of Mr. 
Forbes's fences, which are cheap and steep — ' No 



JAMES ELLIOT CABOT, 123 

place known hath better walls or a broader ditch.' 
I came away saying to myself of J. M. F., — How 
little this man suspects, with his sympathy for men 
and his respect for lettered and scientific people, 
that he is not likely ever to meet a man who is 
superior to himself." 

One friend, early known, but then seldom met, 
— Mr. James Elliot Cabot, — my father became 
acquainted with soon after the latter left college 
and entered on the study of architecture, and was 
attracted and interested by his character and con- 
versation. Mr. Cabot contributed some papers to 
the " Dial," but my father rarely saw him until after 
the forjnation of the Saturday Club when they met 
at the monthly dinners, and indeed a principal at- 
traction to Mr. Emerson in going thither was the 
expectation of a talk with his friend. For years 
he regretted that their paths so seldom came to- 
gether, not knowing that this friend was kept in 
reserve to lift the load from his shoulders in his 
hour of need, and with his presence and generous 
aid render his last days happy. 

For eighteen years after Mr. Emerson came to 
his Concord home his mother lived with him, a 
serene and beautiful presence in the household, 
venerated and loved by her son and daughters, — 
for Miss Hoar, who should have been her son 
Charles's wife, shared with my mother the privi- 



124 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

leges of a daughter's position. Madam Emerson's 
chamber, the room over the study, was a sort of 
quiet sanctuary. There the grandchildren were 
taught to read Mrs. Barbauld's hymns for children. 
After his mother's death my father writes : " Eliza- 
beth Hoar said the reason why Mother's chamber 
was always radiant was that the pure in heart shall 
see God, and she wished to show this fact to the 
frivolous little woman who pretended sympathy 
when she died." 

Her son had her in mind, among others, when 
he wrote : " Behold these sacred persons, born of 
the old simple blood, to whom rectitude is native. 
See them, — white silver amidst the bronze popu- 
lation, — one, two, three, four, five, six, — I know 
not how many more, but conspicuous as fire in the 
night. Each of them can do some deed of the 
Impossible." 

Madam Emerson died in 1853.^ 

The gradual increase of the two-acre lot to a 
little farm of about nine acres, by the purchase of 
the neighboring lots for vegetable garden, orchard 

1 Journal, 1853. " Dr. Frotliinghain told me that the Latin 
verse which he appended to the obituary notice of my mother was 
one which he had read on the toijib of the wife of Charlemagne, 
in a chapel at Mayence, and it struck him as very tender : — 

" Spiritiis haeres sit patriae quae tristia nescit." 
" Let her spirit be heir to the land which knows not a sorrow." 



TEE GARDEN A SNARE. 125 

and pasture, gave Mr. Emerson pleasant grounds, 
protected his study from interruptions incident to 
too near neighbors, and gave him usually an hour's 
exercise a day in the care of his growing trees, and 
incidentally pleasure and health, though he grudged 
the time from his in - door tasks. The record of 
these purchases, by the way, and the terms which 
I find scattered through the account books are an 
amusing commentary upon his alleged shrewdness. 
Work with hoe and spade for an hour or two of 
the day was part of his plan of country life, and 
he did it at first, but soon found that the garden, 
with all its little beckoning and commanding arms 
of pur slain and smart-weed and Roman wormwood 
stretched out, was all too strong and cunning in 
detaining him from his proper task. 

1847. 

Journal. " It seems often as if rejection, sturdy 
rejection were for us : choose well your part, stand 
fast by your task, and let all else go to ruin if it 
will. Then instantly the malicious world changes 
itself into one wide snare and temptation, — escape 
it who can. 

" With brow bent, with firm intent, I go musing 
in the garden walk. I stoop to pull up a weed 
that is choking the corn, and find there are two ; 
close behind it is a third, and I reach out my arm 
to a fourth ; behind that there are four thousand 
and one. I am heated and untuned, and by and 



126 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

by wake up from my idiot dream of chickweed 
and red-root, to find that I with adamantine pur- 
poses am chickweed and pipergrass myself." 

The help of a gardener was found essential even 
at first. 

1847. 

Journal. "In an evil hour I pulled down my 
fence and added Warren's piece to mine ; no land 
is bad, but land is worse. If a man own land, the 
■^ land owns him. Now let him leave home if he 
dare ! Every tree and graft, every hill of melons, 
every row of corn, every hedge-shrub, all he has 
done and all he means to do — stand in his way, 
like duns, when he so much as turns his back on 
his house. Then the devotion to these vines and 
trees and corn hills I find narrowing and poison- 
ous. I delight in long, free walks. These free my 
brain and serve my body. Long marches would be 
no hardship to me. My frame is fit for them. 
I think I compose easily so. But these stoopings 
and scrapings and fingerings in a few square yards 
of garden are dispiriting, drivelling, and I seem to 
have eaten lotus, to be robbed of all energy, and I 
have a sort of catalepsy or unwillingness to move, 
and have grown peevish and poor-spirited." 

His friends, Mr. George Bradford and Henry 
Thoreau, at different times and during their stay 



THE SUMMER-HOUSE. 127 

at his house, took the care of the garden into their 
skilful hands, greatly to his relief, though he came 
out when he could and worked with them, before 
the addition of new fields, the lots whence the 
thirty cords of wood for the fires must he cut and 
hauled home, and the purchase of a horse and one 
or two cows required that a man should be hired 
to give his whole time and attention to the farm. 
This was a relief to my father, but there had been 
in the earlier irregular husbandry much to gild the 
drudgery when his good and manly friends, whose 
greater skill and practical knowledge of the garden 
he admired, worked near him. His friend Chan- 
ning, the poet, once cut his wood for him, and 
Thoreau planted his barren pasture, close by the 
Walden hermitage, which was on his friend's land, 
with pines and larches, and Mr. Alcott, in 1847, 
fashioned from gnarled limbs of pine, oak with 
knotty excrescences and straight trunks of cedar, 
a fantastic but pleasing structure, some hundred 
steps from the house, for a retired study for his 
friend. 

In this work he was helped by Mr. Thoreau, 
whose practical mind was chafed at seeing a build- 
ing, with no plan, feeling its way up, as it were, 
dictated at each step by the suggestion of the 
crooked bough that was used and necessarily often 
altered. He said, " I feel as if I were nowhere 
doing nothing." When it was nearly done some 



128 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

one said, "It looks like a church." The idea was 
not to be tolerated by the transcendental architect, 
so the porch had to come down for its look of un- 
timely sanctimony. 

Thoreau drove the nails, and drove them well, 
but as Mr. Alcott made the eaves curve upward for 
beauty, and lined the roof with velvet moss and 
sphagnum.^ Nature soon reclaimed it. Indeed 
Madam Emerson naively called it " The Ruin " 
when it was fresh from the hand of the builder. 
In spite of its real beauty, which drew many peo- 
ple to see it, the draughts (for it was full of aper- 
tures for doors and windows) and the mosquitoes 
from the meadow close by made it untenable, and 
my father never used it as a study. 

It is pleasant to find in a later journal this rec- 
ord of graceful services done by John Thoreau, 
the older brother of Henry and companion of the 
happy river voyage, who died in early life. 

" Long ago I wrote of Gifts and neglected a 
capital example. John Thoreau, Jr., one day put 
a blue-bird's box on my barn, — fifteen years ago, 
it must be, — and there it still is, with every sum- 
mer a melodious family in it, adorning the place 
and singing his praises. There's a gift for you 
which cost the giver no money, but nothing which 
he bought could have been so good. 

" I think of another quite inestimable : John 
Thoreau knew how much I should value a head of 



LITTLE WALDO. 129 

little Waldo, then five years old. He came to 
me and offered to take him to a daguerreotypist 
who was then in town, and he, Thoreau, would 
see it well done. He did it and brought me the 
daguerre, which I thankfully paid for. A few 
months after, my boy died, and I have since to 
thank John Thoreau for that wise and gentle piece 
of friendship." 

The serious and loving little boy, whose image 
was thus preserved, followed his father from the 
study to the garden in those few years and bright- 
ened all the hours. His solicitous speech, " Papa, 
I am afraid you will dig your leg," has been else- 
where told to illustrate Mr. Emerson's too evident 
unhandiness with tools. I will tell here another 
saying of little Waldo which his father treasured 
as showing his innate refinement. When he car- 
ried him to the Circus and the clown played his 
pranks with the ring-master, the little boy looked 
up with troubled eyes and said, " Papa, the funny 
man makes me want to go home." 

My father soon found that his personal handling 
of hoe and spade was too expensive, and willingly 
laid them down, and although, if rain threatened, 
he would come out to the hayfield to rake, his 
gardening was confined, within my recollection, to 
pruning his trees and picking up pears and apples. 
In his wealth of Gravensteins and Pumpkin-Sweet- 
ings, Seckels, Flemish Beauties and Beurr^ Diels, 



130 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

he took delight and pride, groaned to see the Sep- 
tember gale rudely throw down his treasures before 
the " Cattle - show " Exhibition, and always sent 
thither specimens from his garden. One day after 
this exhibition a party of gentlemen visited his 
orchard who were introduced to him by his neigh- 
bor, Mr. Bull, as a committee of the Massachusetts 
Horticultural Society. He smiled with modest 
pride at having his little orchard thus honored, 

but the Hon. S D , the chairman, said, 

"Mr. Emerson, the committee have called to see 
the soil which produces such poor specimens of 
such fine varieties." Perhaps it was a damp year, 
and in that low land the pears were rusty, but in 
all years the proprietor saw the gold through the 
rust. In his journal he answers some caviller who 
has said, "Your pears cost you more than mine 
which I buy." " Yes, they are costly, but we all 
have expensive vices. You play at billiards, I at 
pear-trees." He likes to note that kind " Nature 
never makes us a present of a fine fruit or berry, 
pear or peach without also packing up along with 
it a seed or two of the same." The orchard throve 
and in time became a source of profit, but pears 
and apples were to him more than so many bar- 
rels of sweet and perfumed pulp to eat or sell. 
He read in Downing's work on Fruit Culture 
the theory of Van Mons, of taking seedlings in a 
"state of amelioration" and, by successive plant- 



PEARS AND APPLES. 131 

ings of the first seeds of the best, surely obtain- 
ing in five or six generations a superior fruit, a 
perfect pear from a harsh, half-wild fruit. Here, 
as everywhere, Mr. Emerson found new evidence 
that barriers and limitations were not really, but 
only seemingly fixed ; that rightly aimed effort 
could break them down ; that all nature was flo\v- 
ing and there was always room for hope. 

In the 1842 Journal he writes : " Delight in 
Van Mons and his pear in a state of melioration ; 
to be liquid and plastic, — that our reading or do- 
ing or knowing should react on us, that is all in 
all." 

In the following observation too he saw his old 
and favorite law of compensation, blessing all in 
time : " While the seeds of the oldest varieties of 
good fruits mostly yield inferior sorts, seed taken 
from recent varieties of bad fruit and reproduced 
uninterruptedly for several generations will cer- 
tainly produce good fruit." 

A sentence, perhaps for use at a cattle-show ad- 
dress, shows what apples were worth to him : — 

" The Newtown Pippins, gentlemen ; are they not 
the Newton Pippins ? or is not this the very pippin 
that demonstrated to Sir Isaac Newton the fall of 
the world, — not the fall of Adam, — but of the 
moon to the earth and of universal gravity ? Well, 
here they are, a barrel of them ; every one of them 
good to show gravitation and good to eat ; every 



132 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

one as sound as the moon. What will you give 
me for a barrel of moons ? " 

He delighted in the use of his lands by aborig- 
inal tenants, Indians or gypsies, when they wan- 
dered through the town, or older and wilder ten- 
ants yet : — 

" The sun athwart the cloud thought it no sin 
To use my land to put his rainbows in." 

Though from the gardener's point of view he 
marked with vindictive eye the ravages of his wife's 
roses and his grapes and plums by insects, yet his 
eye was always open for beauty in humble things, 
though the direction of the motion affected its 
charm : " Rosebugs and wasps appear best when 
flying : they sail like little pinnaces of the air. I 
admired them most when flying away from my 
garden,^'' 

" Solar insect on the wing 
In the garden murmuring, 
Soothing with thy summer horn 
Swains by winter pinched and worn." 

His own want of skill in conducting farming 
operations really heightened the pleasure he took 
in the executive ability of his neighbors. 

1847. 

Journal. " My young friend believed his call- 
ing to be musical, yet without jewsharp, catgut or 
rosin. Yes, but there must be demonstration. 



CAPTAIN ABEL'S MEADOW. 133 

Look over the fence yonder in Captain Abel's 
land.^ " There 's a musician for you, who knows 
how to make men dance for him in all weathers ; 
and all sorts of men, paddies, felons, farmers, car- 
penters, painters, yes, and trees and grapes and 
ice and stone, hot days and cold days. Beat that, 
Menetrier de Mendau, if you can. Knows how 
to make men saw, dig, mow and lay stone -wall, 
and how to make trees bear fruit God never gave 
them, and grapes from France and Spain yield 
pounds of clusters at his door. He saves every 
drop of sap as if it were his own blood. His 
trees are full of brandy, you would think he wa- 
tered them with wine. See his cows, see his swine, 
see his horses, — and he, the musician that plays 
the jig which they all must dance, biped and quad- 
ruped and centipede, is the plainest stupidest look- 

^ This passage is printed and by mistake attributed to Thoreau 
by Mr. Sanborn in his Life of Thoreau. Mr. Emerson and his 
Concord friends seem to have now and then submitted to each 
other scraps of their recent writing on stray sheets. They also 
copied some of these passages that chanced to please them. Thus 
mistakes have occurred in publishing their posthumous writings. 
Tlie above passage however is certainly by Mr. Emerson and 
occurs in this form in his jovirnal, C D, for 1847. 

The little Essay on Prayers included, in good faith, in The 
Yankee in Canada, and Other Papers of Mr. Thoreau, posthu- 
mously published, was written by Mr. Emerson and first published 
in the Dial. It included a prayer in verse written by Mr. Thoreau, 
and the mistake occurred very naturally, as a copy of the whole 
paper in Thoreau' s handwriting was found among his papers. 



134 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

ing harlequin in a coat of no colors. But his are 
the woods and the waters, the hills and meadows. 
With a stroke of his instrument he danced a 
thousand tons of gravel from yonder blowing sand 
heap on to the bog-meadow beneath us where now 
the English grass is waving ; with another he ter- 
raced the sand-hill and covered it wdth peaches 
and grapes ; with another he sends his lowing 
cattle every spring up to Peterboro' to the moun- 
tain pastures." 

"Cyrus Stow wanted his bog meadow brought 
into grass. He offered Antony Colombe, Sol Weth- 
erbee, and whosoever else, seed and manure and 
team and the whole crop ; which they accepted 
and went to work, and reduced the tough roots, the 
tussocks of grass, the uneven surface and gave the 
whole field a good rotting and breaking and sun- 
ning, and now he finds no longer any difficulty in 
getting good English grass from the smooth and 
friable land. What Stow does with his field, what 
the Creator does with his planet, the Yankees are 
now doing \sdth America. It will be friable, arable, 
habitable to men and angels yet ! " 

But the exigencies of the farm brought him into 
constant relation with his immediate neighbors, a 
circumstance agreeable to him and always, I think, 
to them, and whether the farm might prosper or 
no, as a result, one crop he certainly harvested ; all 



CONCORD FARMERS. 135 

was grist that came to his mill. He admired the 
simplicity and fortitude of the Massachusetts far- 
mers' life in those days and to see and record the 
stern rustic economies. 

" The farmer gets two hundred dollars while the 
merchant gets two thousand. But the farmer's 
two hundred is far safer and is more likely to 
remain to him. It was heavy to lift from the soil, 
but it was for that reason more carefully bestowed 
and will stay where it was put, so that the two sums 
turn out at last to be equivalent." - 

After the railroad came and brought Concord 
practically as near to the city as Cambridge had 
been, changed the old corn-and-pumpkin farming, 
with oxen for working cattle, to modern " Sauce- 
gardening " with improved implements and horse- 
machinery, and the town, instead of living mainly 
its own life, became largely a sleeping-place for 
persons who exercised their professions or business 
in Boston, he notices that the young men have an 
amateur air that their fathers never had ; (1848) 
" they look as if they might be railroad agents 
any day. We shall never see Cyrus Hubbard or 
Ephraim Wheeler or Grass-and-oats or Oats-and- 
grass, old Barrett or Hosmer in the next genera- 
tion. These old Saxons have the look of pine-trees 
and apple-trees, and might be the sons got between 
the two ; conscientious laborers with a science born 
in them from out the sap-vessels of these savage 
sires." 



136 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

He saw with awe and veneration the equality of 
the farmer to his task and his bending the appar- 
ently crushing forces of Nature to work for him, — 
triumphs through obedience. " We cannot quite 
pull down and degrade our life and divest it of its 
poetry. The day-laborer is popularly reckoned as 
standing at the foot of the social scale ; yet talk 
with him, he is saturated with the beautiful laws of 
the world. His measures are the hours, the morn- 
ing and night, the solstice, and the geometry, the 
astronomy and all the lovely accidents of nature 
play through his mind continual music." 

** He planted where the Deluge ploughed, 
His hired hands were wind and cloud, 
His eye detects the gods concealed 
In the hummock of the field." 

When in 1857 Mr. Emerson was invited to give 
the annual address before the Middlesex Agricul- 
tural Society, his speech, then called, " The Man 
with the Hoe " (since printed under the title 
" Farming "), showed that if not skilful with the 
implement itself, he had not lived in the country 
in vain, and had seen and recognized the great lines 
on which the farmer must lay out his year's work. 

Mr. Edmund Hosmer, a farmer of the older 
New England type, thrifty and sturdy, conserva- 
tive yet independent, was Mr. Emerson's neighbor 
for many years, and during that time his adviser 
and helper in his rustic affairs. For his character 



NEIGHBORS. 137 

and opinion Mr. Emerson had great respect, and in 
his walks he liked to go by Mr. Hosmer's farm and 
find him ploughing in his field where they would 
have a chat on matters of agriculture, politics or 
philosophy. One of these conversations is reported 
in the " Dial " under title Agriculture of Massa- 
chusetts. 

Close by his house, on the slope of the opposite 
hill, lived George Minot, a descendant of one of the 
early Concord families, — dying out in the male line 
with him, one who had never been in the railroad 
cars, nor but once in Boston, when with the Con- 
cord company he marched there in 1812, but one 
who knew Concord field and forest by heart, — a 
man somewhat of the Rip van Winkle type, then 
more common in Concord than now, who, though 
he kept a cow and raised corn and " crook-necks " 
in his little field, eked out the larder of himself 
and his sister, the village tailoress, with duck and 
partridges, horn-pout and pickerel. He valued and 
took much leisure, and liked to gossip with Mr. 
Emerson over the fence about " the old bow-arrow 
times " when, as he averred he had heard from the 
fathers, deer and otter and raccoons were common 
in Concord and moose had been shot here. 

" Here is George Minot, not so much a citizen 
as a part of nature, in perfect rapport with the 
trout in the stream, the bird in the wood or pond- 
side and the plant in the garden ; whatsoever is 



138 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

early or rare or nocturnal, game or agriculture, 
lie knows, being awake when others sleep, or asleep 
when others wake : snipe, pelican, or breed of 
hogs ; or grafting or cutting ; woodcraft or bees." 

In later years Mr. Emerson had the fortune to 
have Mr. Sam Staples as a neighbor, who with his 
varied gifts and experiences as ex-jailer, auction- 
eer, skilful modern farmer and sensible, friendly 
man was a tower of strength, whether there were 
suspicious tramps around, or carryall or cow must 
be bought, a man or horse or farm implement to be 
borrowed, or advice on any practical subject was 
required. He gives Mr. Emerson the character of 
a " first rate neighbor and one who always kept his 
fences up," and I know that my father was always 
sure of finding hearty help in any emergency, great 
or small, from this best of neighbors. 

1866. 

Journal. " I like my neighbor T.'s manners : 
he has no deference, but a good deal of kindness, 
so that you see that his good offices come from no 
regard for you, but purely from his character." 

" Self respect always commands. I see it here 
in a family little known, but each of whose mem- 
bers, without other gifts or advantages above the 
common, have that in lieu of all : teaching that 
wealth, fashion, learning, talent, garden, fine house, 
servants, can be omitted, if you have quiet deter- 



CONCORD FIFTY YEARS AGO. 139 

minatlon to keep your own way with good sense 
and energy. The best of it is that the family I 
speak of do not suspect the fact." 

He was blessed with many good neighbors, more 
than can be properly named here, and his experi- 
ence led him to write : — 

" 1842. 

" Those of us who do not believe in communities 

believe in neighborhoods, and that the Kingdom of 

Heaven may consist of such." 

1836. 

Journal. " Talking last night with E. H., I 
sought to illustrate the sunny side of every man, 
as compared with his sour and pompous side, by 
the two entrances of all our Concord houses. The 
front door is very fair to see, painted green, with a 
knocker, but it is always bolted, and you might as 
well beat on the wall as tap there ; but the farmer 
slides round the house into a quiet back door that 
admits him at once to his warm fireside and loaded 
table." 

A few anecdotes scattered through the journals 
will properly enough find place in the Book of the 
Social Circle and recall to the senior members pic- 
tures and figures of the Concord of their youth. 

George Minot told my father of old Abel Davis's 
visit to Temple, New Hampshire, and how one day 
while fishing there he pulled up a monstrous pick- 



140 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

erel. " Wall," said he, " who 'd ever ha' thought 
of finding you up here in Temple ? You an' a 
slice o' pork will make Viny and me a good break- 
fast." 

Another neighbor of a practical turn of mind 
thus criticised the working of the solar system : — 

" This afternoon the eclipse. Peter Howe did 
not like it, for his rowan would not make hay ; 
and he said ' the sun looked as if a nigger was put- 
ting his head into it.' " 

As this forcible, though unpoetic imagery 
amused Mr. Emerson, so, as an optimist, he was 
struck by the strong counter-statement of a Con- 
cord worthy, of other days, that " mankind was 
a damned rascal." He quotes another as saying 
that " his son might, if he pleased, buy a gold 
watch ; it did not matter much what he did with 
his money ; he might put it on his back : for his 
part, he thought it best to put it down his neck 
and get tke good of it." 

He notes that the " elective affinities " work in 
Concord as elsewhere : — 

" Old X. was never happy but when he could 
fight. Y. was the right person to marry into his 
family. He was n't the worst man you ever saw, 
but brother to him." 

His doctrine of Compensation receives fresh il- 
lustration in the remark of his friend about one of 
those amphibious persons, now, I fear, extinct on 
the shores of the Musketaquid. 



HEROES OF OTHER DAYS. 141 

" Channing said he would never, were he an in- 
surer, insure any life that had any infirmity of 
goodness in it. It is Goodwin who will catch pick- 
erel : if you have any moral traits you will never 
get a bite." 

" Henry Thoreau told me as we walked this after- 
noon a good story about a boy who went to school 
with him, Wentworth, who resisted the school mis- 
tress's command that the children should bow to 
Dr. Heywood and other gentlemen as they went 
by, and when Dr. Heywood stood waiting and 
cleared his throat with a Hem ! Wentworth said, 
' You need not hem^ Doctor, I shan't bow.' " 

" Deacon Parkman, Thoreau tells, lived in the 
house he now occupies and kept a store close by. 
He hung out a salt fish for a sign, and it hung so 
long, and grew so hard and black and deformed 
that the deacon forgot what thing it was, and no- 
body in town knew, but being examined chemically 
it proved to be salt fish. But duly every morning 
the deacon hung it on its peg." 

He records old Mr. Wesson the tavern-keeper's 
philosophical distinction, when he said, " I thought 
I was asleep, but I knowed I was n't ; " and the self- 
restraint and caution of another village magnate, 
who, reading his newspaper in the grocery, always 
carefully read the passage through three times be- 
fore venturing a comment to his neighbors. An- 
other loyal Concord man, B., the carpenter, reading 



142 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

of the price of building-lots iii rising Chicago, said, 
*' Can't hardly believe that any lands can be worth 
so much money, so far off." 

In those days the last struggles were going on 
between the stage-coach and freight team against 
their terrible rival the railroad train. 

" The teamsters write on their teams, ' No mo- 
nopoly. Old Union Line, Fitchburg, Groton, etc' 
On the guide-boards they paint, ' Free trade and 
teamsters' rights.' " 

When the wave of excitement stirred up by the 
" Eochester knockings," attributed to departed 
spirits, struck Concord (not with any force, how- 
ever), the communications of the " spirits " seemed 
hardly to justify their importunity. Mr. Emerson 
spoke of it as the " rat and mouse revelation," and 
said of the local prophets, quoting the speech of 
Hotspur to his wife when she begs for his secret, 
promising not to reveal it : — 

" For I well believe 
Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know, 
And thus far will I trust thee, gentle Kate." 

Mr. Emerson cheerfully assumed such duties as 
the town put upon him. Almost immediately on 
his coming to Concord he was chosen a member of 
the School Committee, and later he served on it for 
many years. He never felt that he had the small- 
est executive ability, and on the village committee, 



VISITS TO THE SCHOOLS. 143 

as later on the Board of Overseers of the Univer- 
sity, he preserved an unduly modest attitude, sel- 
dom speaking, but admiring the working and rea- 
soning of others. Declamation and reading always 
interested him, and for them he would speak his 
best word at committee meetings or school exhibi- 
tions. When he went to visit a school he forgot 
that he was an inspector, and became a learner. 
Here is a characteristic entry in the journal for 
1854. (The italics are mine.) 

" The way that young woman keeps her school 
was the hest lesso7i I received at the Preparatory 
School to-day. She knew so much and carried it 
so well in her head and gave it out so well that the 
pupils had quite enough to think of and not an idle 
moment to waste in noise or disorder. 'T is the 
best recipe I know for school discipline." 

The sight of clear-eyed girls and manly boys was 
sure to awaken his affectionate interest, and a good 
recitation of a poem never failed to move him and 
make him wish to know more of the young speaker. 

" I told the school company at the Town Hall 
this afternoon that I felt a little like the old gen- 
tleman who had dandled ten sons and daughters of 
his own in succession on his knee, and when his 
grandchild was brought to him, ' No,' he said, ' he 
had cried Kitty, Kitty, long enough.' And yet 
when I heard now these recitations and exercises 
I was willing to feel new interest still. ... I 



144 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

suggested for the encouragement, or tlie warn- 
ing, of the parents, my feeling to-day that the new 
generation was an improved edition of the adult. 
... In conclusion I said that it was plain that the 
end of the institutions of the town and the town 
itself was Education." 

Here are notes of another appeal to his towns- 
men to prize their schools : — 

" First see that the expense be for teaching, or 
that the school be kept for the greatest number of 
days and of scholars. Then that the best teachers 
and the best apparatus be provided. . . . School^ 
— because it is the cultus of our time and place, 
fit for the republic, fit for the times, which no 
longer can be reached and commanded by the 
Church. 

" What an education in the public spirit of Mas- 
sachusetts has been — the war songs, speeches and 
reading of the schools ! Every district-school has 
been an anti-slavery convention for two or three 
years last past. 

" This town has no sea-port, no cotton, no shoe- 
trade, no water-power, no gold, lead, coal or rock- 
oil, no marble ; nothing but wood and grass, — not 
even ice and granite, our New England staples, 
for the granite is better in Acton and Fitchburg, 
and our ice, Mr. Tudor said, had bubbles in it. 
We are reduced then to manufacture school-teach- 
ers, which we do for the southern and western mar- 



THE PLAY-GROUND. 145 

ket. I advise the town to stick to that staple and 
make it the best in the world. It is your lot in the 
urn ; and it is one of the commanding lots. Get 
the best apparatus, the best overseer, and turn out 
the best possible article. Mr. Agassiz says, ' I 
mean to make the Harvard Museum such that no 
European naturalist can afford to stay away from 
it.' Let the town of Concord say as much for its 
school. We will make our schools such that no 
family which has a new home to choose can fail 
to be attracted hither as to the one town in which 
the best education can be secured. This is one of 
those long prospective economies which is sure and 
remunerative." ^ 

Always believing that " evil is only good in the 
making," and mischief useful energy run wild, he 
says, " There is no police so effective as a good hill 
and wide pasture in the neighborhood of the vil- 
lage where the boys can run and play and dispose 
of their superfluous strength of spirits to their 
own delight and the annoyance of nobody," and in 

1 In this speech, made in the last year of the war, he did not 
use the word Teacher in a restricted sense. For he thought of 
all Concord's sons and daughters who had gone forth from the 
village, — whether carrying learning in spelling-books and read- 
ers, or freedom and equal rights on bayonets, or commerce on 
railroads, or New England thrift and orderly life in their exam- 
ple, — as sowing broadcast through the land seeds of virtue and 
civility. 



146 EMERSON IN CONCORD, 

his last years he was readily interested in a plan 
for procuring a public play-ground and laid aside 
a sum of money towards it. He served on the 
Library Committee for many years, and when Mr. 
William Munroe made his noble gift to the town 
of the Library Building, Mr. Emerson made the 
address on the occasion of its opening. 

In 1839 he was elected a member of the Social 
Circle. This gave him opportunity to meet socially 
and in his turn to entertain many of his townsmen 
with whom otherwise from his secluded habits and 
scholarly pursuits he would hardly have formed 
acquaintance. 

In 1844 (Dec. 17th) he writes to a friend 
in Boston : " Much the best society I have ever 
known is a club in Concord called the Social Cir- 
cle, consisting always of twenty-five of our citizens, 
doctor, lawyer, farmer, trader, miller, mechanic, 
etc., solidest of men, who yield the solidest of gos- 
sip. Harvard University is a wafer compared to 
the solid land which my friends represent. I do 
not like to be absent from home on Tuesday even- 
ings in winter." 

His long lecturing trips to the West prevented 
his attendino^ meeting^s so much as he would have 
liked. He was for forty-three years a member ; 
the last meeting he attended being the celebration 
of the hundredth year of the existence of the club 
which occurred only a month before his death. He 
was then the senior member. 



THE CONCORD LECTURES. 147 

Although few of the townspeople knew — what 
I am sure even the few extracts from his journals 
here introduced show — with what human interest 
he watched them, how he praised the wit, or cour- 
age or skill of the seniors, and delighted in the 
beauty or sturdiness of the girls and boys that 
passed him daily, yet his relation to the town first 
and last was pleasant. In speaking to his towns- 
folk in the Lyceum he never wrote down to them, 
but felt them entitled to his best thoughts. 

" Do not cease to utter them," he says to him- 
self, "and make them as pure of all dross as if 
thou wert to speak to sages and demi-gods, and be 
no whit ashamed if not one, yea, not one in the 
assembly, should give sign of intelligence. Is it 
not pleasant to you — unexpected wisdom ? depth 
of sentiment in middle life ? persons that in the 
thick of the crowd are true kings and gentlemen 
without the harness and the envy of the throne ? " 

He held to the faith that all " differences are 
superficial, that they all have one fundamental 
nature," which it was for him to find and awaken. 
And his confidence was justified. In a paper full 
of interesting reminiscences Mr. Albee mentions 
talking with a Concord farmer who said he had 
heard all Mr. Emerson's lectures before the Ly- 
ceum and added — " and understood 'em too." 

But I must also tell that Mrs. Storer relates that 
her mother, Madam Hoar, seeing Ma'am Bemis, a 



148 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

neighbor who came in to work for her, drying her 
hands and rolling down her sleeves one afternoon 
somewhat earlier than usual, asked her if she was 
going so soon : " Yes, I 've got to go now. I 'm 
going to Mr. Emerson's lecture." " Do you under- 
stand Mr. Emerson ? " " Not a word, but I like to 
go and see him stand up there and look as if he 
thought every one was as good as he was." 

A lady tells me that after Mr. Emerson had 
given his lecture on Plato (later printed in " Rep- 
resentative Men ") in Concord, she overtook on 
her way homewards a worthy but literal-minded old 
lady and began to speak of the lecture they had 
just heard. But her neighbor was displeased and 
said that " if those old heathen really did such 
things as Mr. Emerson said they did, the less said 
about them the better." The offending passage 
was this. (The italics are mine.) 

" Plato especially has no external biography. 
If he had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing 
of them. He ground them into paint. As a good 
chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher converts 
the value of all his fortunes into his intellectual 
performances." 

The town called upon him to speak for her on 
her great days. Having in 1835 told the story of 
the godly and earnest men who settled and stab- 
lished the town and of those who defended its soil 



FRIENDLY TOWNSFOLK. 149 

from the oppressor, and two years later at the dedi- 
cation of the Battle Monument compressed that 
chronicle into the few simple lines of the Hymn, it 
fell to him to tell how the grandsons of those 
patriots had been true in their hour of trial, when 
in 1867 the monument was built to those who did 
not return. Last, in his failing years, he spoke a 
few words as the bronze Minute Man took his stand 
to guard through the centuries the North Bridge 
then restored. 

The people of the village felt his friendly and 
modest attitude towards them and were always 
kind. Is it not written in our Book of Chronicles 
what effective and speedy action was taken in the 
silent night by who shall say how many of the past 
and present venerable members of the Social Cir- 
cle, when the only bad neighbor he ever had sought 
to blackmail Mr. Emerson by moving an unsightly 
building on to the lot before his house ? ^ And at 
the burning of his house what a multitude of good 
men and women came with speed and worked with 
zeal to help and to save, in some cases at peril of 
their lives. 

And in his later days, when his powers began to 

^ A number of the youths of Concord procured hooks, ropes 
and ladder, and, uniformed in green baize jackets lent from Mr. 
Rice's store, silently marched in the night to the spot, pulled the 
old frame down with a crash, and withdrew with some speed, 
vainly pursued by the enraged owner. 



150 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

fail and words failed him and he became bewil- 
dered, how often he found helpers and protectors 
start from the ground, as it were, at his need. 

In all his forty-eight years' life in the village I 
do not believe he ever encountered any incivility 
or indignity, except in one trifling instance, which 
I shall tell, not as indicating any ill will, for it was 
the act of two or three idle hangers-on of the bar- 
room, but because it gives an interesting picture. 
It was the practice of the bar-room wits to revenge 
themselves for Dr. Bartlett's courageous and sin- 
cere war upon their temple and inspiring spirit, by 
lampooning him in doggerel verse and attributing 
his florid complexion to other causes than riding in 
all weathers in the humane service of his neighbors. 
One morning there was a sign hung out at the 
Middlesex stable with inscription insulting to Dr. 
Bartlett. Mr. Emerson came down to the Post 
Office, stopped beneath the sign, read it (watched 
with interest by the loafers at tavern, grocery and 
stables) and did not leave the spot till he had 
beaten it down with his cane, and, I think, broken 
it. In the afternoon when I went to school I 
remember my mortification at seeing a new board 
hanging there with a painting of a man with tall 
hat, long nose and hooked cane raised aloft, and, 
lest the portrait might not be recognized, the in- 
scription, " Rev. R. W. E. knocking down the 
Sign." He did not immediately find a champion 



SERVANTS. 151 

and the board remained, I believe, for the rest of 
the day. 

Mr. Emerson's honor for humanity, and respect 
for humble people and for labor, were strong char- 
acteristics. 

Of servants he was kindly and delicately consid- 
erate, and was always anxious while they were pres- 
ent for fear that the thoughtless speech of any one 
might wound their feelings or be misinterpreted. 
The duty to the employed of high speech and ex- 
ample must never be forgotten ; their holidays and 
hours of rest, their attachments and their religious 
belief, must be respected. He was quick to notice 
any fine trait of loyalty, courage or unselfishness 
in them, or evidence of refined taste. " For the 
love of poetry let it be remembered that my copy 
of Collins, after much search, was found smuggled 
away into the oven in the kitchen " [the old brick 
oven, used only for Thanksgiving bakings]. 

" The king's servant is the king himself," quoted, 
I think, from the Persian, and the verse, — 

" At mihi succurrit pro Ganymede manus " 
(My own right hand my cup-bearer shall be), — 

were favorite mottoes, and from boyhood to age he 
was as independent as might be of service from 
others. He built his own fires, going to the wood- 
pile in the yard in all weather for armfuls as he 
needed fuel ; he almost always walked to and from 



152 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

trains, carried his own valise, and when going to 
lecture in a neighboring town, drove himself. He 
always kept one or two ears of Indian corn in his 
cabinet to catch the horse with, if it got out of the 
pasture. 

Napoleon was, I am sure, greatly raised in his 
estimation by his speech to Mrs. Balcombe, when 
on a rugged path at St. Helena they met porters 
with heavy burdens whom she ordered to stand 
aside. Napoleon drew her back, saying, " Kespect 
the burden. Madam." This anecdote my father 
often recalled to us as a lesson. I think that he 
was always regarded with affectionate respect by 
the servants. At a hotel he made a point of in- 
quiring for the porter or " boots " to remunerate 
him before departing. 

Another anecdote which my father often set be- 
fore his children as a lesson in beha^dor, a story 
which I have never been able to trace to its source, 
though it sounds like one of Plutarch's, was to the 
effect that Caesar on a journey to Gaul lodged for 
a night with his officers at the hut of a poor man, 
who, in his zeal for their entertainment, prepared a 
salad of asparagus for his guests with a hair-oil, 
which, tasting, the officers expressed disgust, but 
Caesar frowned on them and ate his portion, bid- 
ding them honor their host's pains on their behalf. 

Mr. Emerson's ot\ti instinct in matters of eating 
and drinking was Spartan. His tastes were sim- 



HIS TEMPERANCE. 153 

pie, and lie took whatever was set before him with 
healthy appetite, but hardly knowing or asking 
what it might be. Rarely he noticed and praised 
some dish in an amusing manner, but, should any 
mention of ingredients arise, he always interrupted 
with " No ! No ! It is made of violets ; it has no 
common history," or other expressions to that pur- 
pose. At the height of the epoch when philoso- 
phers and reformers sought him constantly and sat 
as guests at his table shuddering at flesh or stimu- 
lants, or products of slave-labor, or foreign luxuries, 
or even at roots because they grew downwards, he 
was so hospitable to every new thought or project 
that aimed to make life more spiritual, that he was 
willing to try what might lie in it ; and when his 
guests were gone, he on one or two occasions tried 
their experiment, even went to his study direct 
from his bedroom in the morning for several daj^s, 
and there had bread and water brought to him, in- 
stead of the comfortable family meal and the two 
cups of coffee to which he was accustomed ; but his 
strong sense showed him at once that those very 
means undid what they aimed at, by making ques- 
tions of eating and drinking of altogether too much 
importance, and also unfitting the body and mind 
for their best work, — and temperance, not absti- 
nence, became, as before, his custom without effort 
or further thought about so slight a matter which 
filled smaller men's horizon. It did not escape his 



154 EMERSON IN CONCORD, 

notice that " A. bears wine better than B. bears 
water." 

1839. 
Journal. " Always a reform is possible behind 
the last reformer's word, and so we must stop 
somewhere in our over-refining or life would be 
impossible. . . . Temperance that knows itself is 
not temperance. That you cease to drink wine "oi 
coffee or tea is no true temperance if you still de-] 
sire them and think of them ; there is nothinj 
angelic there. It is thus far only prudence." 

On the question of signing pledges of total ab- 
stinence from ardent spirits, he wrote in 1835 : — 

" No ; I shall not deprive my example of all its 
value by abdicating my freedom on that point. It 
shaU be always my example, the spectacle to all 
whom it may concern of my spontaneous action at 
the time." 

While he valued, and recommended to others, 
especially if dyspeptic, an occasional feast or club 
dinner, — so it did not come too often, — for its 
good effects on body and mind, and liked to give a 
dinner party for a friend at his own house, he de- 
sired that the preparations be not too elaborate or 
removed from the usual mode of living, lest the 
true order be reversed, and hospitality of table and 
service be more evident than that of thought and 
affection. He placed wine before guests of dis- 



PERSONAL HABITS. 155 

creet age and habit and took it with them, seldom 
more than one glass ; and he never took it when 
alone. He had learned to smoke in college and 
resumed the habit in very moderate degree when 
he was about fifty years old, when in company, but 
in his later years he occasionally smoked a small 
fraction of a cigar with much comfort, and then 
laid it by until another time. In the journal of 
1866 he wrote : " The scatter-brain Tobacco. Yet 
a man of no conversation should smoke." 

In dress he was always neat and inconspicuous, 
wearing black clothes and silk hat in the city, and 
dark gray with soft felt hat in the country. He 
once wrote : " How difficult it is to me to see cer- 
tain particulars. I have gone to many dinners 
and parties with instructions from home and with 
my own wish to notice the dress of the men., and 
can never remember to look for it." 

When the gospel of cold bathing was preached 
in New England and the ascetic instinct led so 
many good people to practise it in a dangerous de- 
gree, enjoying breaking ice in their tubs on sharp 
mornings, or, in default of a temperature of 32° 
Fahrenheit, pumping long to get the water from 
the very bottom of the well to hurl down by gallons 
on their poor bodies from the heights of a shower- 
bath, Mr. Emerson, fortunately for his health, en- 
tered into this reform with circumspection. His 
remarks on the bath, when he came down to break- 
fast, were often amusing : — 



156 '^ EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

" I begin to believe that the composition of 
water must be one part Hydrogen and three parts 
Conceit. Nothing so self-righteous as the morn- 
ing bath — the sleeping with windows open. The 
Bath ! the cutaneous sublime ; the extremes meet, 
the bitter-sweet, the pail of pleasure and pain, — 
Oh, if an enemy had done this ! " 

Mr. Emerson was tall, — six feet in his shoes, — 
erect until his latter days, neither very thin nor 
stout in frame, with rather narrow and unusually 
sloping shoulders, and long neck, but very well 
poised head, and a dignity of carriage. His eyes 
were very blue, his hair dark brown, his complex- 
ion clear and always with good color. His fea- 
tures were pronounced, but refined, and his face 
very much modelled, as a sculjjtor would say. 

Walking was his exercise and he was an admi- 
rable walker, light, erect and strong of limb. He 
almost always refused offers to ride in a carriage, 
and seldom on journeys availed himself of omni- 
buses or cabs. He would walk across the city to 
his train, carrying usually his rather heavy leathern 
travelling bag in his hand at such a speed that a 
companion must run to keep up with him, and this 
without apparent effort or any noticeable effect of 
overheat or shortness of breath. " When you have 
worn out your shoes," he said, " the strength of the 
sole-leather has gone into the fibre of your body." 

Once or twice I remember his riding on horse- 



THE ADIRONDACS. , 157 

back, but in this lie had no practice. On his jour- 
ney to California, however, as Mr. Forbes's guest, 
he rode for a day or two in the Yo-Semite Valley 
trip with pleasure and without mishap. His old 
pair of skates alv/ays hung in his study-closet, and 
he went to the solitary coves of Walden with his 
children when he was fifty years old and skated 
with them, moving steadily forward, as I remem- 
ber, secure and erect. In summer, but only on the 
very hot days, he liked to go into Walden, and 
swam strongly and well. 

When in 1857 he went into camp with his 
friends of the Adirondac Club (Agassiz, S. G. 
Ward, W. J. Stillman, Dr. Jeifrfes Wyman, John 
Holmes, Judge E. R. Hoar, J. R. Lowell, Dr. Estes 
Howe, Horatio Woodman), he bought a rifle and 
learned to shoot with it ; this I know, for he gave 
it to me on his return, and instructed me (by no 
means with the readiness of a sportsman) in load- 
ing and firing it, on Mr. Heywood's hill. I believe, 
however, he never shot at any living thing with it. 
He was paddled out by a guide with a torch at 
night, told there was a deer on the shore and made 
out to see a " square mist," but did not shoot. 

He took interest in wild flowers, birds and ani- 
mals in their native haunts, — 

"Loved the wild rose, and left it on its stalk," — 
and for garden flowers never cared so much. 



158 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

"Everybody feels that they appeal to finer senses 
than his own and looks wishfully around in hope 
that possibly this friend or that may be nobler fur- 
nished than he to see and read them. . . . Espe- 
cially they are sent to ceremonies and assemblies, 
sacred or festal or funereal, because on occasions 
of passion or sentiment there may be higher appre- 
ciation of these delicate wonders." 

" To the fir [balsam] tree by my study window 
come the ground-sparrow, oriole, cedar-bird, com- 
mon cross -bill, yellow -bird, goldfinch, cat -bird, 
particolored warbler and robin.'* 

He respected and praised the useful domestic 
animals, though utterly unskilful with them, a lack 
which he regretted, and enjoyed seeing the tact and 
courage of others in managing them. 

1862. 

Journal. " I like people who can do things. 
When Edward and I struggled in vain to drag 
our big calf into the barn, the Irish girl put her 
finger in the calf's mouth and led her in directly." 

He liked to talk with drivers and stable-men, 
and witnessed with keen pleasure Rarey's perform- 
ance and wrote it into one of his lectures, saying 
that all horses hereafter would neigh on his birth- 
day. In his later years he went with zeal to Mag- 
ner's secret horse-training lecture in the stable of 
the Middlesex Hotel, carrying with him two some- 



BIBLE QUOTATIONS. 159 

what astonished English visitors. Pet animals he 
cared nothing for and shrank from touching them, 
though he admired the beauty and grace of cats. 
Lately I received an earnest appeal from a lady, 
writing for " St. Nicholas " on the Canine Friends 
of our Authors and Statesmen, for anecdotes show- 
ing my father's liking for dogs, and particulars of 
the names, color and breed of his canine friends, 
and especially asking for any anecdote of his affec- 
tionate relations with dogs that could be embodied 
in one of the excellent sketches for which that pe- 
riodical is famous. I was only able to tell her of 
the delight and sympathy with which he used to 
read to his family, how when the Rev. Sydney 
Smith was asked by a lady for a motto to be en- 
graved on the collar of her little dog Spot, the 
divine suggested the line from Macbeth, " Out ! / 
damned Spot ! " ' 

So little of the clergyman or pastor remained 
with my father that it was a surprise when any 
evidence of that part of his life and special train- 
ing appeared. But now and then he would quote 
Scripture in an unexpected and amusing manner, 
never irreverently, and the quotations were always 
unusual and often a little perverted from their orig- 
inals. When urged to any doing or spending that 
he did not feel like undertaking he would say, 
" The strength of the Egyptians is to sit still." If 
the children dawdled in getting off to school, he 



\ 



160 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

would look at liis watch and cry, " Flee as tlie roe 
from the hand of the hunter ! " or did I come home 
laden with packages from the store, he would say, 
" Issachar is a strong ass ; he croucheth between 
two burdens." He spoke of the villagers who had 
become possessed of the " spiritualist " revelation 
as " wizards that peep and mutter." When a 
guest had looked askance at such grapes as the 
frost in his low garden had allowed to ripen imper- 
fectly, he would say, " Surely our labor is in vain 
in the Lord," and when the dinner-bell rang, and 
almost every member of the family, remembering 
something he or she had meant to do before the 
meal, would disappear, he said, " Our bell should 
have engraved on it 'I laughed on them and 
they believed me not,' " and this at last was done. 
Once in his early housekeeping, at a time when 
Mr. Emerson was very busy, a distant relative 
came a-cousining, 'and there was reason to believe 
that he planned to take the afternoon stage, but 
he was not very zealous about departing, and the 
stage was not seen until it had just passed the 
house, — the last stage and it was Saturday. Mr. 
Emerson shouted and ran to overtake it and hap- 
pily succeeded. On his return, after seeing the 
guest safely ensconced, his wife smiled and said 
she feared that his zeal on behalf of his relative 
was a little noticeable. " Yes," he said, " my run- 
ning was like the running of Ahimaez the son of 
Zadoc." 



SENSE OF HUMOR. 161 

His position as a scholar and philosopher was 
the stronger that he had the fortunate gift, not 
altogether common in that class, of a sense of hu- 
mor. Few Philistines were more aware of the 
amusing side that his class presented to world's 
people. He felt that they were mostly over- 
weighted in one direction ; in fact bewails the lack 
of " whole men " everywhere, and speaks of those 
who are " an appendage to a great fortune, or to 
a legislative majority, or to the Massachusetts Re- 
vised Statutes, or to some barking and bellowing 
Institution, Association or Church." But of the 
weaknesses too often found in the bookish man he 
was quite aware. Here, under the heading Cul- 
ture^ is a list of tests : " Set a dog on him ; Set a 
highwayman on him : Set a woman on him : Try 
him with money." 

One day when we were talking on the door step 
my father said, looking across the street : " What, 

can that really be ? " (naming a mystic then 

sojourning in town.) " No," said I, '' it is our 

neighbor Mr. B -." " Oh, well," said he, " I 

took him for , and thought he looked more 

like a gentleman and less like a philosopher than 
usual." 

When Miss Fuller's book was published he wrote 
to a friend : " Margaret's book has had the most 
unlooked-for and welcome success. It is a small 
thing that you learned and virtuous people like it, 



162 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

— I tell you the ' Post ' and the ' Advertiser ' 
praise it, and I expect a favorable leader from the 
'Police Gazette.'" 

Some of the extracts given concerning the re- 
formers show that he saw well enough these ab- 
surdities, but he knew that, as every one else saw 
these, he could well afford to look for their virtues. 
Here are one or two observations on other classes 
however which may be amusing enough to intro- 
duce, though printed : " Here comes Elise, who 
caught cold in coming into the world and has al- 
ways increased it since." Those persons " who can 
never understand a trope or second sense in your 
words, or any humor, but remain literalists after 
hearing the music and poetry and rhetoric and wit 
of seventy or eighty years. . . . They are past the 
help of surgeon or clergy. But even these can un- 
derstand pitchforks or the cry of Fire ! and I have 
noticed in some of this class a marked dislike of 
earthquakes." But he enjoyed wit at his own ex- 
pense, and was much amused to hear that " the 
audience that assembled to hear my lectures [the 
course of 1856-7] in these last weeks was called 
the effete of Boston." He never failed to be com- 
pletely overcome with laughter if any one recited 
the imitation of Brahma, beginning, — 

" If the gray tom-cat thinks he sings, 
Or if the song think it be sung, 
He little knows who boot-jacks flings 
How many bricks at him I 've flung." 



EYE AND EAR. 163 

Loud laughter, which he considered a sign of 
the worst breeding, he was never guilty of, and 
when he laughed he did so under protest, so to 
speak, and the effort while doing so to control the 
muscles of his face, over which he had imperfect 
command, made a strange struggle visible there. 
But the fun must be good or the satire keen : — 

" Beware of cheap wit. How the whole vulgar 
human race every day from century to century 
plays at the stale game of each man calling the 
other a donkey." 

Mr. Emerson had a good eye for form, and, that 
he would have drawn well with practice, the heads 
which he drew sometimes for his children's amuse- 
ment showed. He had less eye for color, conse- 
quently delighted more in the work of Michael 
Angelo, Guercino, Salvator Rosa, and Raphael's 
cartoons, and especially in Greek sculpture, than 
in other works of art. He cared little for land- 
scape painting. The symbolic, not the literal, 
charmed him. He seemed to have little value for 
the picturesque, rather objected to having it pointed 
out, and his own strange lines, — 

" Loved Nature like a horned cow, 
Bird or deer or caribou," — 

nearly conveyed his own almost savage love, for it 
sometimes seemed as if the densest sprout-land, 
almost suffocating the walker with pollen or the 



164 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

breath of sweet-fern on a hot summer afternoon, 
and thick with horseflies, was as agreeable to him 
as the glades and vistas that would charm an artist. 
And yet his eye sought and found beauty every- 
where. Especially did it please him to find the 
" grace and glimmer of romance " which mist or 
moonlight or veiling water could give to humblest 

objects ; — 

" Illusions like the tints of pearl 
Or changing colors of the sky ; " — 

or to see planetary motion in a schoolboy's play. 

" I saw a boy on the Concord Common pick up 
an old bruised tin milk-pan that was rusting by the 
roadside and poising it on the top of a stick, set it 
a-turning and made it describe the most elegant 
imaginable curves." For he had what he called 
" musical eyes." 

Journal. " I think sometimes that my lack of 
musical ear is made good to me through my eyes : 
that which others hear, I see. All the soothing, 
plaintive, brisk or romantic moods which corre- 
sponding melodies waken in them, I find in the 
carpet of the wood, in the margin of the pond, in 
the shade of the hemlock grove, or in the infinite 
variety and rapid dance of the tree-tops as I hurry 
along." 

He had not, as he says, the musical ear, could 
not surely recognize the commonest airs, but was 
interested to hear good music occasionally. 



VOICE. 165 

" I think sometimes, could I only have music on 
my own terms, could I live in a city and know 
where I could go whenever I wished the ablution 
and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath 
and a medicine." 

He liked to hear singing, preferring a woman's 
voice, but the sentiment of the song and the spirit 
with which it was rendered and the personal qual- 
ity of the voice were more to him than the har- 
mony. 

His own voice in reading or speaking was agree- 
able, flexible and varied, with power unexpected 
from a man of his slender chest. His friend Mr. 
Alcott said of him '' that some of his organs were 
free, some fated : the voice was entirely liberated, 
and his poems and essays were not rightly pub- 
lished until he read them." 

Of his hardihood of mind and body he had good 
need on his long lecturing trips, as will presently 
be seen. The exposures seemed to do him no 
harm, and he usually returned in better health 
than when he set out, and yet he always suffered 
from cold, and learned on this account to make 
a rule to go to hotels rather than private houses, 
and I have often heard his first word on arriving 
to hotel clerk or waiter, — " Now make me red- 
hot." He had had his full share of sickness in 
youth, but from the age of thirty until his last 



166 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

illness he only once or twice fell sliort of the best 
health, and though taken good care of at home, 
his own maxims and regimen, almost the same as 
Napoleon's, served him when abroad, namely, when 
health was threatened, to reverse the methods that 
had brought the attack. Warmth, water, wild air, 
and walking were his medicines. 

February 7, 1839. 
Journal. " The drunkard retires on a keg and 
locks himself up for a three days' debauch. When 
I am sick I please myself not less in retiring on a 
salamander stove, heaping the chamber with fuel 
and inundating lungs, liver, head and feet with 
floods of caloric, heats on heats. It is dainty to 
be sick, if you have leisure and convenience for it. 
One sees the colors of the carpet and the paper 
hangings. All the housemates have a softer, fainter 
look to the debilitated retina." 

He had love and tenderness for very small chil- 
dren, and his skill in taking and handling a baby 
was in remarkable contrast to his awkwardness 
with animals or tools. The monthly nurse, who 
drew back instinctively when he offered to take a 
new-born baby from her arms, saw in another 
moment that she had no cause to shudder, for noth- 
inof could be more delicate and skilful and confi- 
dent than his manner of holding the small scrap 
of humanity as delighted and smiling he bore it up 



TREATMENT OF CHILDREN. 167 

and down the room, making a charming and tender 
address to it. His little boy, the first-born of his 
family (two sons and two daughters), died at the 
age of five. His good friend Judge Hoar writes : 
" I think I was never more impressed with a hu- 
man expression of agony than when Mr. Emerson 
led me into the room where little Waldo lay dead 
and said only, in reply to whatever I could say of 
sorrow or sympathy, " Oh, that boy ! that boy ! " 

A very little child always had the entrance and 
the run of his study, where it was first carried 
around the room and shown the Flaxman statuette 
of Ps}' che with the butterfly wings, the little bronze 
Goethe, the copy of Michael Angelo's Fates which, 
because of the shears and thread, were always in- 
teresting. The pictures in the old " Penny Maga- 
zine " were the next treat, and then, if the child 
wanted to stay, pencil and letter-back were fur- 
nished him to draw with. After a time, if the vis- 
itor became too exacting, he was kindly dismissed, 
the fall being softened by some new scheme sug- 
gested. Entire sweetness and tact and firmness 
made resistance and expostulation out of the ques- 
tion. 

If a child cried at table Mr. Emerson sent it 
out to see whether the gate had been left open or 
whether the clouds were coming up, so sure was 
he that the great calm face of Nature would soothe 
the little grief, or that her brilliant activity of 



168 



EMERSON IN CONCORD. 



wind and sun would divert the childisli mind. The 
small ambassador, a little perplexed as to why 
he was sent then, returned, solemnly reported and 
climbed back into his high chair. 

My father seldom romped with the children, and 
any silliness or giggling brought a stern look ; the 
retailing any gossip or ill-natured personal allu- 
sions heard outside was instantly nipped in the 
bud. No flippant mention of love, in even the 
childish romances of school, could be made, and 
the subject of death was also sacred from any light 
speech or jest. 

The watchword which his Aunt Mary had given 
him and his brothers, " Always do what you are 
afraid to do," was prescribed to us and enforced as 
far as possible. 

The annoyance which his own shyness and self- 
consciousness had cost him made him desire that 
young people should have whatever address and 
aplomb could be got by training, so he urged that 
they should dance and ride and engage in all out- 
of-door sports. 

On in - door games he looked with a more jeal- 
ous eye, remembering how he and his friends had 
amused themselves with good reading ; only toler- 
ated his children's acting in juvenile plays, and 
always disliked card-playing. On one occasion two 
of us had just learned some childish game of cards, 
and being dressed some time before breakfast, sat 



CARD-PLAYING. 169 

down to play. When lie entered be exclaimed, 
" No ! No ! No ! Put them away. Never affront 
the sacred morning with the sight of cards. When 
the day's v/ork is done, or you are sick, then per- 
haps they will do, but never in the daylight ! No ! " 
Probably the traditions of his youth and his fam- 
ily's calling had something to. do with the aversion 
always felt for cards, but his value of Nature and 
books as teachers made him grudge valuable time 
so spent. 

He always expected that Sunday should be ob- 
served in the household, not with the old severity, 
but with due regard for a custom which he valued 
for itself as well as for association, and also for the 
feelings of others. We could read and walk and 
bathe in Walden, then secluded, but were not ex- 
pected to have toys or to play games or romp or to 
go to drive or row. He was glad to have us go to 
church. His own attitude in the matter was, that 
it was only a question for each person where the 
best church was, — in the solitary wood, the cham- 
ber, the talk with the serious friend, or in hearing 
the preacher. This was shown when a young 
woman working in his household, in answ^er to his 
inquiry whether she had been to the church, said 
brusquely, "No, she did n't trouble the church 
much." He said quietly, " Then you have some- 
where a little chapel of your own," a courteous as- 
sumption which perhaps set her thinking. He never 



170 



EMERSON IN CONCORD. 



liked to attack the beliefs of others, but always 
held that lower beliefs needed no attacks, but were 
sure to give way by displacement when higher ones 
were given. One evening after a conversation 
where zealous radicals had explained that the 
death of Jesus had been simulated, not real, and 
planned beforehand by him and the disciples for 
its effect on the people, while he thereafter kept in 
hiding, my mother tells that she asked my father, 
" Should you like to have the children hear that ? " 
He said, " No ; it 's odious to have lilies pulled up 
and skunk-cabbages planted in their places," 

As our mother required us to learn a hymn on 
Sundays he would sometimes suggest one or two 
which he valued out of the rather unpromising 
church collection which we had,^ or put in our 
hands Herrick's White Island or Litany to the 
Holy Spirit, Herbert's Elixir or Pulley, or part of 
Milton's Hymn of the Nativity. 

He liked to read and recite to us poems or prose 
passages a little above our heads, and on Sunday 
mornings often brought into the dining-room some- 
thing rather old for us, and read aloud from Sou- 
they's Chronicle of the Cid, or Froissart's Chroni- 
cles, or Burke's speeches, or amusing passages from 
Sydney Smith or Charles Lamb or Lowell. One 

^ Wesley's hymn was a favorite, beginning, — 

♦' Thou hidden love of God 1 whose height, 
Whose depth unfathomed, no man kno wb." 



SUNDAY. 171 

rainy Sunday when we could not go to walk we got 
permission from our mother to play Battledore and 
Shuttlecock for a little while, but no sooner did 
the sound of the shuttlecock on the parchment bat- 
head ring through the house than we heard the 
study door open and our father's stride in the en- 
try. He came in and said : " That sound was never 
heard in New England before on Sunday and must 
not be in my house. Put them away." 

- November^ 1839. 

Journal. " The Sabbath is my best debt to the 
Past and binds me to some gratitude still. It 
brings me that frankincense out of a sacred anti- 
quity." 

On Sunday afternoons at four o'clock, when the 
children came from their Bible -reading in their 
mother's room he took them all to walk, more often 
towards Walden, or beyond to the Ledge (" My 
Garden"), the Cliffs, the old Baker Farm on Fair- 
haven, or Northward to Caesar's Woods, Peter's 
Field, or to Copan (Oak Island) on the Great 
Meadows, or the old clearings, cellar -holes and 
wild-apple orchards of the Estabrook country, and 
sometimes across the South Branch of the river to 
the tract named Conantum by Mr. Channing from 
the Conants, its proprietors. 

He showed us his favorite plants, usually rather 
humble flowers such as the Lespideza, — 



172 



EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

" This flower of silken leaf 
That once our childhood knew," ^ — 



or the little blue Self-heal ^ whose name recom- 
mended it. He led us to the vista in his woods 
beyond Walden that he found and improved with 
his hatchet ; 

" He smote the lake to please his eye 
With the beryl beam of the broken wave ; 
He flung in pebbles, well to hear 
The moment's music which they gave ; " 

and on the shores of frozen Walden on a dull 
winter's day halloed for Echo in which he took 
great delight, like Wordsworth's boy of Winder- 
mere. Echo, the booming of the ice on the pond 
or river, the wind in the pines and the -<Eolian 
harp in his west window were the sounds he best 
loved. At one time he had heard in the White 
Mountains a horn blown with so wonderful reply 
of Echo that he often recalled it with joy and went 
thither in his later years, but the Echo was gone, 
the building of some barn had so affected the con- 
ditions. 

Often as he walked he would recite fragments 
of ballads, old or modern ; Svend Vonved, Battle 
of Harlaw, Scott's Dinas Emlinn, Alice Brand, 

^ The Dirge. 

'■^ *' All over the wide fields of earth grows the pninella or Self- 
heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies 
of its hours," etc. — Natube, in Essays, 2d Series. 



RECITATION OF POETRY. 173 

and Childe Dyring, Wordsworth's Boy of Egre- 
mond, Byron's lines about Murat's Charge, and oc- 
casionally would try upon us lines of poems that 
he was composing, "The Boston Hymn," or the 
Romany Girl, " crooning " them to bring out their 
best melody. 

He took the greatest interest in our recitation of 
poetry, and pleased himself that no one of us could 
sing, for he said he thought that he had observed 
that the two gifts of singing and oratory did not 
go together. Good declamation he highly prized, 
and used to imitate for us the recitation of certain 
demigods of the college in those days when all the 
undergraduates went with interest to hear the Se- 
niors declaim. 

On our return from school after " Speaking 
Afternoon " he always asked, " Did you do well ? " 
" I don't know." " Did the boys study or play, or 
did they sit still and look at you ? " " Several of 
them did n't attend." " But you must oblige them 
to. If the orator does n't command his audience 
they will command him." 

He cared much that we should do well in Latin 
and in Greek, liked to read our Virgil with us, and 
even Viri Romce^ and on days when I had stayed at 
home from school and congratulated myself that 
tasks were dodged, sent me to the study for " The 
thick little book on the fourth shelf," and spent an 
hour with me over Erasmi Colloquia. But with 



174 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

our dislike of mathematics he sympathized, said we 
came by it honestly, and would have let us drop 
the subject all too soon, but for the requirements 
of school and college curriculum. He was uneasy 
at seeing the multitude of books for young people 
that had begun to appear which prevented our 
reading the standard authors as children, as he and 
his brothers had done. He required his son to 
read two pages of Plutarch's Lives every schoolday 
and ten pages on Saturdays and in vacation. 

The modern languages he was careless about, 
for he said one could easily pick up French and 
German for himself. 

He had the grace to leave to his children, after 
they began to grow up, the responsibility of decid- 
ing in more important questions concerning them- 
selves, for which they cannot be too grateful to 
him ; he did not command or forbid, but laid the 
principles and the facts before us and left the case 
in our hands. 

Nothing could be better than his manner to chil- 
dren and young people, affectionate and with a 
marked respect for their personality, as if perhaps 
their inspiration or ideal might be better than his 
own, yet dignified and elevating by his expectations. 
He was at ease with them and questioned them 
kindly, but as if expecting from them something 
better than had yet appeared, so that he always 
inspired affection and awe, but never fear. The 



INFLUENCE ON THE YOUNG. 175 

beauty, the sincerity, the hopefulness of young 
people charmed him. Hearing from Mrs. Lowell 
the generous discontent of her son Charles with 
the conditions of society, he wrote to her, " I hope 
he will never get over it." The son did not, and 
this ferment made his short and brilliant life, 
ended on the battle-field of Cedar Creek, one con- 
tinuous and intelligent endeavor to help on the 
world. 

In a letter to a friend in 1837, Mr. Emerson 
had said what were the duties of the thinker and 
scholar : " Sit apart, write ; let them hear or let 
them forbear ; the written word abides, until slowly 
and unexpectedly and in widely sundered places it 
has created its own church." The young were his 
audience and the whole history of his middle and 
later life was the justification of this course. Not 
only did the best young spirits of Cambridge find 
that the Turnpike road led to a door, only thirteen 
miles away, always open to any earnest questioner, 
but from remote inland colleges, from workshops 
in cities of the distant States, from the Old World, 
and last even from India and the islands of the 
Pacific Ocean, came letters of anxious and trusting 
young people seeking help for their spiritual con- 
dition. And these letters were answered and often, 
years afterward, the writer himself came. Mr. 
Emerson's excuse to the Abolition Reformers for 
not giving himself wholly up to their cause, — that 



176 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

he had his own imprisoned spirits to free, — was 
justified, for the burden of these letters is in al- 
most every case, " Your book found us in darkness 
and bonds ; it broke the chain ; we are thankful 
and must say it. You will still help us." 

The story of his awakening and liberating influ- 
ence has been publicly told by several of the young 
men who found in him a helper. Matthew Arnold 
said : — 

" There came to us in that old Oxford time a 
voice also from this side of the Atlantic, a clear 
and pure voice, which for my ear . . . brought a 
strain as new and moving and unforgetable as the 
strain of Newman or Carlyle or Goethe." 

But when the young visitor asked of God or of 
Heaven as he would about the President or the 
market, and clumsily handled the great mysteries 
of Life and Death as if they were by-laws of a 
club, he received never a direct answer,^ but one 

^ Compare the following passages from journals between 1840 
and 1850 : — 

'* Everything in the Universe goes by indirection. There are no 
straight lines." 

" If we could speak the direct solving words it would solve us 
too." 

* ' The gods like indirect names and dislike to be named di- 
rectly.' ' 

' ' In good society, say among the angels in heaven, is not every- 
thing spoken by indirection and nothing quite straight as it be* 
fell?" 



IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS. 177 

that threw a side light on the question, showed its 
awful and vast proportions, set him thinking about 
it for himself with a new feeling of what he was 
dealing with. 

Mr. Emerson was, as Arnold said, the friend of 
those who would live in the Spirit, but he only 
wished to free them, not to throw his newer chains 
on them. 

In his journal (1856) he writes cheerfully : " I 
have been writing and speaking what were once 
called novelties for twenty-five or thirty years and 
have not now one disciple." The would-be disciples 
must go, he held, to the fountain which he had 
pointed out, for themselves, and might well get a 
deeper insight than he. " I make no allowance for 
youth in talking with my friends. If a youth or 
maiden converses with me I forget they are not as 
old as I am." 

Mr. Bradford relates that once while he and my 
father were travelling in the White Mountains 
they met a city friend at a hotel. This gentleman 
and Mr. Emerson were talking in some public part 
of the hotel on books and men, when a green youth, 
probably a student, who sat by, became interested 
and tried to join in the conversation, putting ques- 
tions to them. At length he broke in with, " Well, 
what do you think of Romulus ? " This not seem- 
ing a promising theme, this gentleman said in 
French to Mr. Emerson, " Let us talk in French," 



178 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

but the latter entirely refused to notice so rude a 
proposal. 

On lecturing, Mr. Emerson mainly depended for 
his livelihood, for his books brought him little until 
the last years of his life. But for the building of 
the Fitchburg Railroad, Concord would soon have 
become an impossible place of residence for one 
whose field for work had become greatly enlarged 
by the rapid spinning of the net-work of iron rails 
over the continent. From courses in the near New 
England cities and such villages as could be 
reached in a few hours in a chaise, year by year 
the programme became more extensive and com- 
plicated, and from 1850 for twenty years each win- 
ter meant for him at least two months of arduous 
travel from Maine to the new States beyond the 
Mississippi, speaking almost every night, except 
Sundays, during that time. Travelling now in the 
close and dirty cars of those days, now making a 
connection by a forty mile drive in an open sleigh 
on the bleak prairie, or, in a thaw, on wheels sunk 
to the hubs in glutinous mud, now in a crowded 
canal boat, sometimes staying at wretched taverns, 
or worse, in the deadly cold spare bedroom of a pri- 
vate house, now in fine hotels, sometimes dragging 
his trunk through the suffocating corridors of a 
burning inn, sometimes crossing the Mississippi in 
an open boat, partly on ice, partly in water, — he 



CROSSING THE MISSTSSIPPI. 179 

went cheerfully and found much to admire and to 
enjoy, ignoring all discomforts or making the best 
of them. In the journals, always taken up with 
thoughts, recording seldom an incident, one rarely 
finds allusion to the experiences of his yearly win- 
ter campaign. Here are a few glimpses of this 

part of his life : — 

« 1851. 

" You write a discourse and for the next weeks 
and months are carted about the country at the tail 
of that discourse simply to read it over and over." 

On the last day of the year 1855 he writes : — 
" I have crossed the Mississippi on foot three 
times " between the Iowa and Illinois shores, re- 
membering, no doubt, as he slid along the line in 
which he delighted in the old Danish ballad, Svend 
Vonved, — 

"Ice is of bridges the bridge most broad." 

At the Le Claire House in Davenport he noted 
for his guidance the posted rules of the house : 
" No gentleman permitted to sit at the table with- 
out his coat. No gambling permitted in the 
house," and heard his stalwart table-companions 
between their talk of land-sales call for " a quarter- 
section of that pie." At Rock Island he finds him- 
self advertised as "The Celebrated Metaphysician," 
at Davenport as " The Essayist and Poet." 

Though once he said that in hotels " the air is 



180 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

buttered — the whole air a volatilized beef -steak," 
he usually rather praises than finds fault, for as 
early as 1843 he wrote : " An American is served 
like a noble in these city hotels, and his individu- 
ality as much respected ; and he may go imperially 
along all the highways of iron and water. I like 
it very well that in the heart of democracy I find 
such practical illustration of high theories." 

" I am greatly pleased with the merchants. In 
railway cars and hotels it is common to meet only 
the successful class and so we have favorable speci- 
mens, but these discover more manly power of all 
kinds than scholars ; behave a great deal better, 
converse better, and have independent and sufficient 



manners." 



He was still at school, and again writes : — 
" Travelling is a very humiliating experience to 
me. I never go to any church like a railroad car 
for teaching me my deficiencies." 

In Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and on the trains 
he found John W. Brooks, Reuben N. Rice, the 
Hurds, Hosmers, Warrens, and other young men 
from Concord or its neighborhood, and year by 
year the enterprising young people of the growing 
West met him, helped him in every way they 
could, and gave him real pleasure by showing not 
only the great material prosperity of the country, 
but that intellectual and spiritual interests also 
grew. 



WESTERN TOWNS. 181 

In January, 1867, Mr. Emerson wrote from Fond 
du Lac, Wisconsin, to his ever-helpful friend, Mr. 
Wiley, of Chicago : " Such a citizen of the world as 
you are should look once at these northern towns, 
which I have seen under the perhaps too smiling 
face of the mildest, best winter weather, which may 
be exceptional, though the people almost to a man 
extol their climate. Minneapolis would strongly 
attract me if I were a young man, — more than St. 
Paul, — and this town [Fond du Lac] is a wonder- 
ful growth, and shines like a dream seen this morn 
from the top of Amory Hall." 

On these journeys he always had one or two 
books in his satchel, often Latin or French. 

" One should dignify and entertain and signalize 
each journey or adventure by carrying to it a liter- 
ary masterpiece and making acquaintance with it 
on the way, — Dante's Vita Nuova, Horace, ^schy- 
lus, Goethe, Beaumarchais." 

When his eyes tired, the level prairie landscape, 
made even more monotonous by its mantle of snow, 
though here and there it was varied by a grove or 
timbered river-bottom, gave such relief as it could. 
Here is the rolling panorama rendered into a prose- 
poem : — 

" The engineer was goading his boilers with pine 
knots. The traveller looked out of the car win- 
dow ; the fences passed languidly by ; he could 
scan curiously every post. But very soon the jerk 



182 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

of every pulse of the engine was felt ; the whistle 
of the engineer moaned short moans as it swept 
across the highway. He gazed out over the fields ; 
the fences were tormented, every rail and rider 
twisted past the window ; the snow-banks swam 
past like fishes ; the near trees and bushes wove 
themselves into colored ribbons ; the rocks, walls, 
the fields themselves, streaming like a mill-tail. 
The train tore on with jumps and jerks that tested 
the strength of oak and iron. The passengers 
seemed to suffer their speed. Meantime the wind 
cried like a child, complained like a saw -mill, 
whistled like a fife, mowed like an idiot, roared like 
the sea, and at last yelled like a demon." 

While speaking of the lecturer, there is a story 
told me by one of my father's friends in a neigh- 
boring town that gives a pleasant picture. 

Mr. Willard, of Harvard, Mass., the village where 
William Emerson first preached, said that when 
my father came to lecture there many years ago 
the Curator of the Lyceum rose in the desk and 
said : " I have the pleasure as well as the honor 
of introducing to you this evening the Rever- 
end " — " Oh, we can do without the ' Reverend,' 

Mr. ," said Mr. Emerson, looking up from 

his papers, loud enough to be heard by many of 
the audience, who were much amused. He used 
to say, " Never mind about the amount of com- 
pensation, I will always come here, for this is my 
father's town." 



TERMINUS. 183 

In the month of December, 1866, I, returning 
from six months on a Western railroad, met my 
father in New York just setting out for his winter's 
journey to the West, and we spent the night to- 
gether at the St. Denis Hotel. He read me some 
poems that he was soon to publish in his new vol- 
ume, May Day, and among them Terminus. I was 
startled, for he, looking so healthy, so full of life 
and young in spirit, was reading his deliberate 
acknowledgment of failing forces and his trusting 
and serene acquiescence. I think he smiled as he 
read. That year Harvard, which had closed her 
gates to him after his Divinity School Address, 
again, after nearly a generation had passed, opened 
them wide to him, for a new spirit had come upon 
her. He was made Doctor of Laws and Overseer ; 
in 1867, asked to give the Phi Beta Kappa ad- 
dress once more, and in 1869 was invited by the 
College to give a course of lectures on Philosophy 
to the students. 

This invitation gave him pleasure, but came too 
late. He had said to a friend, " I never was a 
metaphysician, but I have observed the operations 
of my faculties for a long time and noted them, 
and no metaphysician can afford to do without 
what I have to say." These notes he now endeav- 
ored to bring into form. He called this course 
the Natural History of the Intellect, but his 
strength was beginning to fail, the ordering of his 



184 EMERSON IN CONCORD, 

ideas, always to him the difficult part of his work, 
was especially important in such lectures, and the 
stress of preparing two new lectures a week for six 
weeks was too much for his strength. His necessi- 
ties obliged him still to work hard, giving lectures 
and readings in the w^inter and composing during 
the summer. It was always difficult to make him 
take a vacation. Mere amusement he could not 
take. When he could not write, then he read or 
went to his woods, but reading or walking were 
alike seeding for his crops. 

During the decade between 1860 and 1870 he 
took great pleasure in meeting once a month at 
dinner in Boston the members of the Saturday^ 
Club, Agassiz, Lowell, Holmes, Longfellow, Nor- 
ton, Hawthorne, Judge Hoar, Governor Andrew, 
Senator Sumner, Elliot Cabot, John M. Forbes, 
and other friends. 

He continued his usual work, but in a less de- 
gree, during 1870 and 1871 going less far to the 
westward in winter, the College course however 
giving him most anxiety and fatigue. In the spring 
of 1871 Mr. John M. Forbes, a valued friend 
through many years, saw how Mr. Emerson's work 
was telling on him, and that he would not take the 
needed rest, and insisted on carrying him off as his 
guest on a vacation trip to California under the 
pleasantest conditions. His friend Mr. James B. 
1 Sometimes spoken of as the Atlantic Club, but not the same. 



BURNING OF HIS BOUSE. 185 

Thayer, who afterward wrote an account of this 
journey, Mr. Emerson's daughter Edith, her hus- 
band, Colonel William H. Forbes, and other friends, 
were of the party. The excursion greatly refreshed 
him and very probably prolonged his life. The 
next winter, though he had not meant to go to the 
West again, Mr. Emerson would not refuse the 
appeal of burnt Chicago, and for her sake gave up 
his Thanksgiving festival at home, at which all the 
clan gathered yearly about his board. 

The failure of his strength, and especially his 
memory, showed in the lectures given in Boston in 
the winter of 1871-2, but had hardly been gener- 
ally perceived until after the sickness following the 
exposure, excitement and fatigue undergone on the 
morning of July, 1872, when he and his wife awoke 
to escape, imperfectly clad, from their house in 
flames, into the rain, and then had worked beyond 
their strength with their zealous and helpful neigh- 
bors in saving their effects. 

His good friends sent him abroad with his daugh- 
ter Ellen for his rest and pleasure while his house 
was being rebuilt by their kindness. Mr. William 
Ralph Emerson, his kinsman, generously gave plans 
and advice for the restoration of the house, and 
Mr. John S. Keyes offered to superintend the work, 
giving much time and care to it, and through these 
acts of thoughtful kindness Mr. Emerson was set 
free to travel and recruit his powers. Before he 



186 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

went, while many doors were thrown wide open to 
him and his family^ he chose the Manse, the Con- 
cord home of his youth and boyhood, where his 
cousin, Miss Ripley, affectionately received them. 
A semblance of a study was fitted up for him in 
the Court House, but he could not work, — only 
search for and endeavor to sort his manuscripts. 
He wrote to his friend Dr. Furness : — 

" August 11, 1872. 
... "It is too ridiculous that a fire should 
make an old scholar sick : but the exposures of 
that morning and the necessities of the following 
days which kept me a large part of the time in the 
blaze of the sun have in every way demoralized me 
for the present, — incapable of any sane or just 
action." [He tells that the portrait of his daughter 
Edith, painted by young William Furness, was 
saved from fire, and then, after apologizing for 
various f orgetfulnesses in acknowledging letters he 
ends : — ] " These signal proofs of my debility and 
decay ought to persuade you at your first northern 
excursion to come and reanimate and renew the 
failing powers of your still affectionate old Friend, 

"E. W. Emekson." 

Mr. Emerson sailed for England in the autumn 
of 1872, made a short stay in London and Paris, 
Florence and Rome, too much broken to take much 



WELCOME HOME. 187 

pleasure, but felt a real desire to go up the ancient 
Nile, and found better health and some enjoyment 
in this winter trip as far as Philse, as he said he 
should be unwilling to go home after having come 
so far, really attracted to Egypt by a wish to see 
the grave of ''him who lies buried at Philae." ^ 

He was so far improved in health that he was 
willing to spend the spring in England and go 
about among people, and he everywhere met with 
great courtesy and kindness. He saw once more 
his friend Carlyle, then feeble and sad, and other 
friends old and new, but he was in even greater 
haste to return home than in 1834, and gladly 
landed in Boston in May. 

When the train reached Concord, the bells were 
rung and a great company of his neighbors and 
friends accompanied him, under a triumphal arch, 
to his restored house. He was greatly moved, but 
with characteristic modesty insisted that this was 
a welcome to his daughter and could not be meant 
for him. Although he had felt quite unable to 
make any speech, yet seeing his friendly towns- 
people, old and young in groups watching him 
enter his own door once more, he turned suddenly 
back and going to the gate said : " My friends ! I 
know that this is not a tribute to an old man and 
his daughter returned to their house, but to the 
common blood of us all — one family — in Con- 
cord ! " 

^ Isis here deposited the remains of Osiris. 



188 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

The feverish attack following the burning of his 
house, which he alluded to in his letter to Dr. 
Furness, seemed to him an admonition to put his 
affairs in order before he should die. He there- 
fore, during a journey taken that summer with his 
daughter Ellen to Waterford, Maine, thought and 
talked much to this purpose, and his directions were 
written down. The question daily recurring, who 
should be his literary executor, troubled him, and 
though Mr. Cabot was constantly in his thought, 
the favor seemed to him all too great to ask of 
him. His family resolved that they must ask this 
great gift for him from his friend. When told 
that a most generous and cordial consent had been 
given, his heart was set entirely at rest. 

Mr. Emerson, after his return from Europe, 
applied himself diligently day after day to correct- 
ing and revising the proofs laid down at the time 
of the fire, but soon, though something was accom- 
plished, it became sadly evident that he needed 
skilled assistance to complete the work. Meantime 
the English and American publishers pressed him 
for the book, long due, from which only his broken 
health had obtained for him a reprieve. It was 
natural for the family in this emergency to turn to 
Mr. Cabot. They proposed to him to begin his task 
during my father's lifetime and put this book in 
order. He came, and the tangled skein smoothed 
itself under his hand, and Mr. Emerson, when the 



MR. CABOT'S HELP. 189 

work was laid before him with the weak points 
marked, was able to write the needed sentence or 
recast the defective one, so that after a few visits 
from Mr. Cabot the book, which had long pre- 
sented insuperable difficulties, had taken definite 
shape, and was ready in season for the publishers. 
And not only was this done and the long anxiety 
about the literary executorship dispelled, but to 
have this friend, whom he had never seen so much 
of as he desired, thus brought often to his house 
and drawn nearer was an inexhaustible pleasure. 
He always spoke of Letters and Social Aims to 
Mr. Cabot as " your book." Nothing could exceed 
the industry and skill brought to the task, nor the 
delicacy and kindness shown throughout, and the 
peace of mind thus procured made Mr. Emerson's 
last days happy. He allowed his children to ask 
Mr. Cabot to write his biography in the future, and 
when, with great hesitation and modesty, a consent 
was given, was well content. He felt towards Mr. 
Cabot as to a younger brother. 

In 1875 Mr. Emerson was nominated by the In- 
dependents among the students of the University 
of Glasgow for the office of Lord Rector for that 
year, and received five hundred votes, Lord Bea- 
consfield, the successful candidate, having seven 
hundred. It was fortunate that Mr. Emerson 
failed of election, for the duty of the Lord Rector 
was to deliver the annual address to the students, 



190 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

and for this task and the two voyages he was no 
longer fit. 

Soon after, he was notified of his election as as- 
sociate member of the French Academy. In 1876 
he received his first call from the South, and not 
liking to say nay, went thither accompanied by his 
daughter and read an address (of course written 
some time before) to the Literary Societies of the 
University of Virginia. The paper was a charac- 
teristic paean over the happiness of the scholar, 
who, he always said, "had drawn the white lot in 
life." The war was too recent for this occasion to 
be entirely a pleasant one. 

His last few years were quiet and happy. Na- 
ture gently drew the veil over his eyes ; he went to 
his study and tried to work, accomplished less and 
less, but did not notice it. However he made out 
to look over and index most of his journals. He 
enjoyed reading, but found so much difficulty in 
conversation in associating the right word with his 
idea, that he avoided going into company, and on 
that account gradually ceased to attend the meet- 
ings of the Social Circle. As his critical sense be- 
came dulled, his standard of intellectual perform- 
ance was less exacting, and this was most fortunate, 
for he gladly went to any public occasion where he 
could hear, and nothing would be expected of him. 
He attended the Lyceum and all occasions of 
speaking or reading in the Town Hall with unfail- 
ing pleasure. 



THE LAST YEARS. 191 

He read a lecture before his townspeople each 
winter as late as 1880, but needed to have one of 
his family near by to help him out with a word 
and assist in keeping the place in his manuscript. 
In these last years he liked to go to church. The 
instinct had been always there, but he had felt that 
he could use his time to better purpose. 

Friendly letters came by every mail, and some 
very astonishing ones ; visitors often came, and were 
kindly received by him. His books, which, during 
the first ten or fifteen years after they began to ap- 
pear, the publishers had called " very poor-paying 
stock," now found a ready sale and were widely 
distributed and known, and were translated into 
other languages. 

I read last year in the " Century Magazine " a 
sad story of a young Russian who, in despair, had 
lately ended his life by his own act, in far Siberia, 
and who was first imprisoned, as a student, for hav- 
ing in his possession a borrowed copy of the essay 
on Self -Reliance. 

In a letter to my father in 1854 Horatio Green- 
ough, the sculptor, wrote : " I found your Repre- 
sentative Men in the hands of a dame du palais 
in Vienna in 184'8, and have learned that she has 
been exiled, having made herself politically ob- 
noxious." 

In 1857, after a happy walk with Thoreau, 
Mr. Emerson recounted in his journal the treas- 



192 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

ures that this high-steward of Nature had shown 
him, and went on : — 

" But I was taken with the aspects of the forest, 
and thought that to Nero advertising for a new 
pleasure, a walk in the woods should have been 
offered. 'T is one of the secrets for dodging old 
age." 

TO THE WOODS. 

" Whoso goeth in your paths readeth the same 
cheerful lesson, whethei* he be a young child or a 
hundred years old. Comes he in good fortune or 
in bad, ye say the same things, and from age to age. 
Ever the needles of the pine grow and fall, the 
acorns on the oak ; the maples redden in autumn, 
and at all times of the year the ground-pine and 
the pyrola bud and root under foot. What is 
called fortune and what is called time by men, ye 
know them not. Men have not language to de- 
scribe one moment of your life. When you shall 
give me somewhat to say, give me also the tune 
wherein to say it. Give me a tune like your winds 
or brooks or birds, for the songs of men grow old, 
when they are repeated ; but yours, though a man 
have heard them for seventy years, are never the 
same, but always new, like Time itself, or like 
love." 

He could see his woods from the car window, 
and said, " when I pass them on the way to the 
city, how they reproach me ! " 



WALKING. 193 

When Old Age came he found him still walking 
in the woods and that the spirit was proof against 
his attacks, though he might injure the organs and 
frame. My father walked to the last, and liked to 
go to the woods, but could not walk so far as in 
earlier days, and Walden woods were so sadly 
changed by publicity from the green temples that 
first he knew, that he had little pleasure in going 
to them. 

All through life he was cheerful by temperament 
and on principle, and in his last days he was very 
happy. He took great pleasure in his home. He 
loved his country, his town, his wife, his family, 
and constantly rejoiced in the happiness of his lot. 

In April, 1882, a raw and backward spring, he 
caught cold and increased it by walking out in the 
rain and, through forgetfulness, omitting to put on 
his overcoat. He had a hoarse cold for a few days, 
and on the evening of April nineteenth I found 
him a little feverish, so went to see him next day. 
He was asleep on his study sofa, and when he woke 
he proved to be more feverish and a little bewil- 
dered, with unusual difficulty in finding the right 
word. He was entirely comfortable and enjoyed 
talking, and as he liked to have me read to him, I 
read Paul Revere's Ride, finding that he could 
only follow simple narrative. He expressed great 
pleasure, was delighted that the story was part of 
Concord's story, but was sure he had never heard 



194 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

it before, and could hardly be made to understand 
who Longfellow was, thougb he had attended his 
funeral only the week before. Yet, though dulled 
to other impressions, to one he was fresh as long 
as he could understand anything, and while even 
the familiar objects of his stud}^ began to look 
strange he smiled and pointed to Carlyle's head 
and said, " That is my man, my good man ! " I 
mention this because it has been said that this 
friendship cooled and that my father had for long 
years neglected to write to his early friend. He 
was loyal while life lasted, but had been unable 
to write a letter for years before he died. Their 
friendship did not need letters. 

The next day pneumonia developed itself In a 
portion of one lung and he seemed much sicker ; 
evidently believed he was to die, and with difficulty 
made out to give a word or two of instructions to 
his children. He did not know how to be sick and 
desired to be dressed and sit in his study, and as 
we had found that any attempt to regulate his 
actions lately was very annoying to him, and he 
could not be made to understand the reasons for 
our doing so in his condition, I determined that it 
would not be worth while to trouble and restrain 
him as it would a younger person who had more to 
live for. He had lived free : his life was essen- 
tially spent, and in what must almost surely be his 
last illness we would not embitter the occasion by 
any restraint that was not absolutely unavoidable. 



DEATH. 195 

He suffered very little, took his nourishment 
well, but had great annoyance from his inability to 
find the words which he wished for. He knew his 
friends and family, but thought that he was in a 
strange house. He sat up in a chair by the fire 
much of the time, and only on the last day stayed 
entirely in bed. Dr. Charles P. Putnam advised 
with me about his treatment. 

During the sickness he always showed pleasure 
when his wife sat by his side, and on one of 
the last days he managed to express, in spite of 
his difficulty with words, how long and happily 
they had lived together. The sight of his grand- 
children always brought the brightest smile to his 
face. On the last day he saw several of his friends 
and took leave of them. When it was told him 
that Mr. Cabot had come, his face lighted up, and 
he exclaimed, " Elliot Cabot ? Praise ! " 

Only at the last came pain, and this was at once 
relieved by ether, and in the quiet sleep thus pro- 
duced he gradually faded away in the evening of 
Thursday the twenty-seventh day of April, 1882. 
His death was from weakness, not from the extent 
of the disease in the lung. 

Thirty-five years earlier he wrote in his journal 
(October 21, 1837) : " I said when I awoke, 
After some more sleepings and wakings I shall 
lie on this mattress sick ; then dead ; and through 
my ga}^ entry they will carry these bones. Where 



196 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

shall I be then ? I lifted my head and beheld the 
spotless orange light of the morning beaming up 
from the dark hills into the wide universe." 

On Sunday, the thirtieth of April, his body was 
laid first by the altar in the old church while the 
farewell words were spoken in the presence of a 
great assembly of friends and townsmen and many 
who had come from afar to do him reverence, then 
under the pine - tree which he had chosen on the 
hill above Sleepy Hollow by the graves of his 
mother and child ; even as he had written, when a 
youth in Newton, " Here sit Mother and I under 
the pine - tree, still almost as we shall lie by and 
by under them." 



There remain a few points, which, though touched 
on in the foregoing sketch, could not there, without 
too great interruption of the narrative, be so fully 
stated as seems to me desirable. I have therefore 
reserved them for mention here, unwilling to let 
pass this opportunity to say what I think to be the 
truth regarding my father's characteristic opinions 
and actions where they have been called in ques- 
tion. 

Much has been said in print of Mr. Emerson's 
"shrewdness," and those who delight in classic 



SHREWDNESS. 197 

contrasts, like those made by Plutarch between his 
heroes, have pleased themselves by heightening the 
effect of Carlyle's ill-health, incapacity for looking 
after his own interests and consequent poverty, by 
allusion to the health and prosperity of his friend 
with his "Yankee" traits. Certainly the men 
were very unlike, — so much so that it is most for- 
tunate that that enduring friendship was never put 
to the severe test of Carlyle's coming to dwell in 
Concord, as Mr. Emerson long hoped he would, — 
but the comparisons that have often been made do 
not tell the story rightly. 

As for health, Mr. Emerson's early letters show 
that for ten years, from the time he taught school 
in Boston until his first voyage to Europe in 1833, 
he struggled hard against disease, to which both of 
his younger brothers succumbed, and won his way 
through to the good health of his active life as 
writer and lecturer by sacrifice, prudence, and more 
than all by good hope; sometimes hope against 
hope. 

As for shrewdness, and prosperity, he began life 
burdened with responsibilities and with debts from 
which by hard work and the closest economy he 
had just freed himself, when trouble threatening 
lungs and hip obliged him to decline good opportu- 
nities of settling himself over a parish, and accept 
the kindly help of his kinsman to enable him to 
go into long banishment for his health's sake in 



198 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

tlie South. The property that came to him later 
gave him respite and helped save his life, but was 
impaired by various claims that he willingly recog- 
nized and responsibilities which he assumed to his 
kin by blood and marriage, and also by sympathy 
of ideas, — he always had " Ms poor," of whom 
few or none else took heed, — so that he soon came 
under the necessity of strict economy and constant 
arduous work to keep free from debt. 

The whole tale of the shrewdness has been told 
when it has been said that he was usually right in 
his instincts of the character of the persons with 
whom he dealt (though often he imputed more 
virtue than was rightly there), and that he avoided 
being harnessed into enterprises not rightly his, 
lived simply, served himself and went without 
things which he could not afford, only however to 
give freely for what public or private end seemed 
desirable or commanding on another and better 
day. These simple rules were his utmost skill. 
He had no business faculty or even ordinary skill 
in figTires ; could only with the greatest difficulty 
be made to understand an account, and his dealings 
with the American publishers on behalf of Mr. 
Carlyle, adduced in proof of his Yankee " faculty," 
really only shows what love and loyalty he bore his 
friend, that he would freely undertake for him 
duties so uncongenial and, — but for outside help 
and expert counsel, — almost impossible for him. 



FINANCIAL MATTERS. 199 

For many years lie made his own arrangements 
for lectures, undertaking courses in Boston at his 
own risk and giving lectures in the courses of Ly- 
ceums which applied to him in the East and the 
West, arranging the terms by correspondence with 
the committees, usually accepting those they offered, 
— small compensation even in cities, and in the 
country towns almost nominal. Often he gave his 
lectures without compensation to little towns in the 
neighborhood with small means, for he had a great 
tenderness for the country Lyceum as the best gift 
a village had for its thoughtful persons, especially 
the youth. Later the remuneration was better, 
liberal in the large cities, and these, especially in 
the West, made arrangements with many towns in 
the neighborhood each to engage a lecture, and this 
custom soon gave rise to Lyceum Bureau system. 

Happily he had always friends ready with wise 
counsel or, if need were, with helping hand, to 
bridge over any difficulty. Their counsel he gladly 
used, but always shrank from pecuniary aid that 
could not be repaid, though on two occasions in his 
latter years he brought himself to allow so much 
for friendship's sake. 

His friend and parishioner, Mr. Abel Adams, a 
Boston merchant of most simple and sterling char- 
acter, earlier mentioned in this narrative, was for 
many years his business adviser. The failure of 
some Vermont railroads in which Mr. Adams had 



200 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

himself put much money, and advised them as an 
investment to my father, so troubled this good man 
that he insisted on assuming charge of the expense 
of Mr. Emerson's son while in Harvard College 
during the hard times due to the war. It was only 
from so dear and old a friend, and after consider- 
ing the proposition for some time, that my father 
was willing to accept this gift. 

Mr. Emerson's contracts with his publishers 
were made by himself, and, as a result, not greatly 
to his advantage, so that the sums received from 
his books, though the sales constantly increased, 
were small. 

A trusted agent who quarterly gave what seemed 
to my father " masterly and clear-headed state- 
ments of account " of his real estate, but very lit- 
tle money, after years of fraud, had the property 
barely saved from his grasp before he defaulted, 
bv Mr. Emerson's son-in-law. Mr. Forbes then 
asked my father's leave to take charge also of his 
business arrangements about his books, and very 
soon the returns from the sale of these were 
doubled, partly owing to the increasing demand, 
but more to the good oversight and management. 
The shrewd Mr. Emerson was astonished and al- 
most troubled at his champion's audacity, and felt 
almost ashamed to receive his dues.^ But for this 

^ It is due to the memory of Mr. James T. Fields, at one time 
Mr. Emerson's publisher, to say that he was always a friend and 
did him all kinds of substantial service. 



THE REFORMERS. 201 

timely aid Mr. Emerson, in the last years of his 
life, would have been vexed with serious anxieties 
about money matters when he could no longer 
earn. 

The noble gift which his friends forced upon him, 
to rebuild his house and send him abroad, extended 
farther, and helped to make his last years comfort- 
able. 

Many persons who held Mr. Emerson in high 
regard felt that he was the dupe of the Reformers, 
the strange beings that filled the roads in those 
days and have been so wittily described by Haw- 
thorne and others, — 

" Dreamers of dreams, bom out of their due time." 

Of these poor souls Mr. Emerson was very ten- 
der. The parish poor and the African had their 
friends and defenders, but these were his poor. 

1841. 

Journal. " Rich say you ? Are you rich ? how 
rich? rich enough to help anybody? rich enough 
to succor the friendless, the unfashionable, the ec- 
centric ? rich enough to make the Canadian in 
his wagon, the travelling beggar with his written 
paper which recommends him to the charitable, the 
Italian foreigner with his few broken words of 
English, the ugly lame pauper hunted by overseers 



202 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

from town to town, even the poor insane or half- 
insane wreck of man or woman, feel the noble ex- 
ception of your presence and your house from the 
general bleakness and stoniness ; to make such feel 
that they were greeted with a voice that made them 
both remember and hope ? What is vulgar but to 
refuse the claim ? What is gentle but to allow 
it?"i 

That he saw through the reformers, and that 
no one was more aware of their shortcomings than 
he, the extracts that I shall give will show ; but he 
believed that every man should be taken by his 
best handle, so to speak, if you would raise him 
or get the good of him. Here are the outcries 
that would come when he came back to his study 
after wearying talks with these " monotones," as 
he called them : — 

1842. 

Journal. " Could they not die ? or succeed ? or 
help themselves ? or draw others ? or draw me ? or 
offend me? in any manner, I care not how, could 
they not be disposed of, and cease to hang there in 
the horizon an unsettled appearance, too great to 
be neglected, and not great enough to be of any 
aid or comfort to this great craving humanity. 

1 This passage and that on page 210, though printed in the es- 
say on Manners, so truly describe their author's action that it 
seemed best to introduce them. 



FRUIT-LANDS. 203 

Oh, if they could take a second step, and a third ! 
The reformer is so confident, that all are erect 
while he puts his finger on your special abuse and 
tells you your great want in America. I tell him, 
yea, but not in America only, but in the universe 
ever since it was known, just this defect has ap- 
peared. But when he has anatomized the evil, he 
will be called out of the room, or have got some- 
thing else in his head. Remedied it will never 
be." 

" But C. L. gives a good account of his conver- 
sation with B , who would drive him to an ar- 
gument. He took his pencil and paper out of his 

pocket and asked B to give him the names of 

the profoundest men in America. B stopped 

and gave him one, and then another, and then his 

own for third. B never will stop and listen, 

neither in conversation, but what is more, not in 
solitude." 

July 8, 1843. 

Journal. " The sun and the evening sky do not 
look caliner than Alcott and his family at Fruit- 
lands. They seemed to have arrived at the fact, 
to have got rid of the show, and so to be serene. 
Their manners and behavior in the house and in 
the field were those of superior men, — of men at 
rest. What had they to conceal ? what had they to 
exhibit ? and it seemed so high an attainment that I 
thought, as often before, so now more because they 



204 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

had a fit home, or the picture was fitly framed, that 
these men ought to be maintained in their place by 
the country for its culture. Young men and young 
maidens, old men and women should visit them and 
be inspired. I think there is as much merit in 
beautiful manners as in hard work. I will not 
prejudge them successful. They look well in July. 
We will see them in December. I know they are 
better for themselves, than as partners. One can 
easily see that they have yet to settle several 
things. Their saying that things are clear and 
they sane, does not make them so. If they will in 
very deed be lovers and not selfish ; if they will 
serve the town of Harvard, and make their neigh- 
bors feel them as benefactors, wherever they touch 
them, they are as safe as the sun." 

1842. 

Journal. " A man cannot force himself by any 
self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor pota- 
toes, nor by violent passivities, by refusing to swear, 
refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking 
another man's crop. ... By none of these ways 
can he free himself, no, nor by paying his debts 
with money ; only by obedience to his own genius, 
only by the freest activity in the way constitutional 
to him, does an angel seem to arise and lead him 
by the hand out of all wards of the prison." 



DEALINGS WITH THE PROPHETS. 205 

1841. 
Journal. " I weary of dealing with people each 
cased in his several insanity. Here is a fine per- 
son with wonderful gifts, but mad as the rest and 
madder, and, by reason of his great genius, which 
he can use as weapon too, harder to deal with. I 
would gladly stand to him in relation of a bene- 
factor, as screen and defence to me, thereby having 
him at some advantage and on my own terms, that 
so his frenzy may not annoy me. I know well that 
this wish is not great, but small ; is mere apology 
for not treating him frankly and manlike ; but I 
am not large man enough to treat him firmly and 
unsympathetically as a patient, and if treated 
equally and sympathetically as sane, his disease 
makes him the worst of bores." 

A modern novel-writer subdivides the Saints 
into the simple saints and the knowing ones, and 
there is no doubt Mr. Emerson belonged to the 
latter class. 

Here is a parable : — 

" You ask, O Theanor, said Amphitryon, that 
I should go forth from this palace with my wife 
and children, and that you and your family may 
enter and possess it. The same request in sub- 
stance has been often made to me before by num- 
bers of persons. Now I also think that 1 and my 
wife ought to go forth from the house and work 



206 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

all day in the fields and lie at night under some 
thicket, but I am waiting where I am, only until 
some god shall point out to me which among all 
these applicants, yourself or some other, is the 
rightful claimant." 

Journal. " In reference to the philanthropies of 
the day it seems better to use than to flout them. 
Shall it be said of the hero that he opposed all the 
contemporary good because it was not grand ? I 
think it better to get their humble good and to 
catch the golden boon of purity and temperance 
and mercy from these poor [preachers and reform- 
ers]." 

To the most advanced souls of that day abstract 
speculations had quite sunk out of sight and mem- 
ory mundane duties of themselves or those whom 
they would enlist or enlighten, and it is easy to 
see that their entertainer might well find it hard 
to have lecture or book ready on a certain day. 
These men of Olympian leisure, who might well 
have inspired the poem " The Visit," rose only re- 
freshed from their morning's talk. It is told that 
at one house visited by such prophets, the little 
girl, sent to reconnoitre, returned crying out in 
despair, " Mamma ! they 've begun again ! " 

It is but fair to tell, as an illustration of the law 
of compensation, that an astounding recoil followed 



BACKSLIDERS. 207 

in the minds and practice of many of those strange 
visitors who sat around the table, " chacun souriant 
a sa chimere,^^ roundly denouncing, by implica- 
tion, their entertainers, and sometimes starting bolt 
upright and answering to their hostess's hospitable 
offers of service, "Tea! I?" or, "Butter! I?" 
or condemning the institutions of the family or of 
domestic service to which they at the moment 
owed their comfort. The most notable example 
was that of one of those apostles who had come to 
Mr. Emerson to show him that all use of money 
was wicked, and a few years later wrote him a 
simple and confident letter, telling of his engage- 
ment to a lady, — the counterpart of himself, — 
and that, as she was not strong and he did not 
wish her to work, he asked Mr. Emerson to " send 
them a competence " to be married on. Later one 
who desired a better education and was sure of Mr. 
Emerson's interest in the plan, wrote for the money 
"by the last part of this week or fore part of next." 

The felicitous combination, from an economical 
point of view, of the diverse tastes of the pair cel- 
ebrated in Mother Goose may have suggested this 
thought to the entertainers of the saints. : — 

" What a pity that the insanities of our insane 
are not complementary, so that we could house two 
of them together." 

Among these men-of-one-idea he mentions one, 
perhaps less tedious than the others because of the 



208 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

novelty o£ his mania, who explained to the company 
in the coach " all the way from Middlebo rough, his 
contrivances for defending his own coffin in his 
grave from body-snatchers. He had contrived a 
pistol to go off, pop ! from this end, and a pistol, 
pop ! from that end, and he w^as plainly spending 
his life in the sweets of the revenge he was going 
to take after death on the young doctors that should 
creep to his graveyard." 

Another reformer who came to New England 
from over seas, and while visiting Mr. Emerson 
was a very Rhadamanthus in his strictures on the 
social fabric of the times, became later a broker. 
But amidst these lapses one shining exception 
must be chronicled. There was a certain wander- 
ing prophet of those days, careless and sceptical of 
aught else, but who believed in the Sun. This 
saint would have gone attired in a sheet only, a 
garment readily unfolded or completely shed when 
he would receive benign influences shot down to 
him from the Sun-god, but that the mistress of the 
house, in the Community which he would have 
joined and converted, told him with decision that 
he must wear proper clothes or depart promptly. 
Under these restrictions he pined, soon took the 
road, and, I am told, was last seen going up a 
moimtain, to come nearer to his deity. It is 
thought that he was absorbed into the Sun. 
Henceforth he was not seen among men. 



THE RUSSIAN PROPHET. 209 

Mr. Emerson's high principle in dealing with 
these people appears in this passage : "I will as- 
sume that a stranger is judicious and benevolent. 
If he is, I will thereby keep him so. If he is not, 
it will tend to instruct him." 

But he established certain iron rules for the 
management of the pilgrims. No railing or wilful 
rudeness or uncleanness would he permit. In the 
autumn of 1871, some years after the arrival of 
the more wild and uncouth Eeformers had ceased, 
a man short, thick, hairy, dirty arid wild-eyed came 
to our door and asked to see Mr. Emerson. I 
showed him into the parlor and went to call my 
father, and returned with him, the guest had so 
wild a look. It appeared that he came from Rus- 
sia, and very possibly the distance he had had to 
travel may have accounted for his very late arrival. 
He stood with his hat on : I knew that that hat 
would have to come off before spiritual communi- 
cation could be opened, but wondered how it could 
be got off, as the man looked determined. My 
father saliited him, asked him to be seated and 
offered to take his hat. He declined and began to 
explain his mission. My father again asked him 
to take his hat off, which proposition he ignored 
and began again to explain his advanced views. 
Again the host said, " Yes, but let me take your 
hat, sir." The Russian snorted some impatient 
remark about attending to such trifles, and began 



210 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

again, but my father firmly, yet with perfect sweet- 
ness, said, " Very well then, we will talk in the 
yard," showed the guest out, and walked to and fro 
with him under the apple-trees, patiently hearing 
him for a few minutes ; but the man, who was a 
fanatic, if not insane, and specially desired that a 
hall be secured for him, free of charge, to address 
the people, soon departed, shaking off the dust of 
bis feet against a man so bound up in slavish cus- 
toms of society as Mr. Emerson. 

What he says of Osman — the name that seems 
in his journals to stand for the Ideal Man, — by no 
means himself, but exposed to the same vicissitudes 
and acting wisely in all — might well describe his 
own history, so well did he live up to his thought.^ 

1841. 

Journal. " Let it be set down to the praise of 
Osman that he had a humanity so broad and deep 
that, though his nature was so subtly fine as to 
disgust all men with his refinements and spider- 
spinnings, yet there was never a poor outcast, ec- 
centric or insane man, some fool with a beard, or 
a mutilation, or pet madness in his brain, but fled 
at once to him — that great heart lay there so 

1 In the journal of 1841, under the name of Osman, this pas- 
sage occurs : ' ' Seemed to me that I had the keeping of a secret 
too great to he confided to one man ; that a divine man dwelt 
near me in a hollow tree." 



"IMPUTED righteousness:' 211 

sunny and hospitable in the centre of the country. 
And the madness which he harbored he did not 
share. Is not this to be rich, — this only to be 
rightly rich ? " 

I have heard him accused of having seen almost 
divinities in the young protestants of that day — 
Sons of the Morning whose early ideal too soon 
faded. But if before noonday the cry went up, as 
in too many cases " Lucifer, Son of the Morning, 
how art thou fallen ! ' his faith in them was one 
hope the more left to them, and he did not lose 
sight of them when few friends remained. 

1861. 

Journal. " I so readily imputed symmetry to 
my fine geniuses in perceiving their excellence in 

some insight. How could I doubt that , that 

, or that , as I successively met them, was 

the master mind which in some act he appeared ? 
No, he was only master mind in that particular act. 
He could repeat the like stroke a million times, but 
in new conditions he was inexpert and in new com- 
pany he was dumb. . . . The revolving light re- 
sembles the man who oscillates from insignificance 
to glory, — and every day and all life long. So 
does the waxing and waning moon." 

His earliest friend. Dr. Furness, said of Emer- 
son : "If there was one thing more characteristic 



212 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

of him than anything else, it was the eagerness 
and delight with which he magnified the slight- 
est appearance of anything like talent or genius or 
good that he happened to discover, or that he fan- 
cied he discovered in another." 

As for himself, his awkwardness, the supposed 
lack of sympathetic qualities, the inability to dis- 
cuss and defend his statements among worlds-peo- 
ple, this " doom of solitude " and safety in it which 
he felt, that made him call himself jestingly a 
" kill-joy " in a house, and feel that it was an im- 
position on his host for him to make a visit more 
than a day long — all these limitations it is certain 
that he greatly magnified. 

Though loving children, and with exceedingly 
ready sympathy for any visible hurt or wound, 
considerate to animals, and always 

'* Kindly man moving among his kind " 

in village or travel or his own house, he was hos- 
pitable to the ideal selves of people, but utterly 
unsympathetic to their littlenesses and complaints, 
on principle, as he wished others to be to him. For 
sickness he had great horror because of its too fre- 
quent debasing effect on the mind. He said : " It 
is so vicious. 'T is a screen for every fault to hide 
in ; idleness, luxury, meanness, wrath and the most 
unmitigated selfishness." He was by no means 
without long and trying experience of illness him- 



CONCENTRATION IN WRITING. 213 

self in his early youth. It does not do to judge by 
his written words of his action in this matter. He 
was far from being cruel or even unsympathetic in 
real cases, or those which he could understand, 
though his healthy temperament was utterly una- 
dapted to deal with anything morbid. 

To judge of Mr. Emerson the writer, or to com- 
pare him with others, is no part of my plan. But 
those who care for his results may be interested in 
the evidence which I can bring of his method and 
theory of work. He asked, " Can you sail a ship 
through the Narrows by minding the helm when 
you happen to think of it ... or accomplish any- 
thing good or powerful in this manner ? That you 
think [the scholar] can write at odd minutes only 
shows what your knowledge of writing is." He 
said that if the scholar feels reproach when he 
reads the tale of the extreme toil and endurance of 
the Arctic explorer, he is not working as he should, 
and he himself through all his life worked with 
constancy and concentration. 

1851. 

Journal. " To every reproach I know but one 
answer, namely, to go again to my own work. ' But 
you neglect your relations.' Yes, too true ; then I 
will work the harder. ' But you have no genius.' 
Yes, then I will work the harder. ' But you have 
no virtues.' Yes, then I will work the harder. 



214 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

' But you have detached yourseK and acquired the 
aversation of all decent people : you must regain 
some position and relation.' Yes, I will work the 
harder." 

But let no one suppose that he taught that mere 
activity and will can write the essay or poem : 
these only loosened the soil, as it were, put the 
mind in a receptive condition, and opened the in- 
ward ear to the great voices that 

" talk in the breath of the wood, 
They talk in the shaken pine, 
And fill the long reach of the old sea-shore 
With dialogue divine." 

But what he " overheard," as he liked to say, must 
be written down and interpreted in the seclusion 
of his study. There he worked alone, writing, or 
reading with reference to his writing, usually six 
hours or more by day and two or three in the even- 
ing ; and his recreations, his walks to the woods or 
his visit to the city and conversations with others, 
whether scholar, farmer, or merchant, were all sifted 
and winnowed on his return to his study for obser- 
vations and thoughts : — 

" For thought, and not praise, 
Thought is the wages 
For which I sell days. 
Will gladly sell ages 
And willing grow old, 
Deaf and dumb and blind and cold, 



VALUE OF ACTION. 215 

Melting matter into dreams, 
Panoramas which I saw 
And whatever glows or seems 
Into substance, into Law." 

As, to receive a polish, the iron must be of good 
quality, so the scholar and poet must first be a 
man, know the ordinary lot and the daily chances 
of the race, but then read the meaning, not the 
surface appearances. 

Journal. " I do not see how any man can af- 
ford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to 
spare any action in which he can partake. It is 
pearls and rubies to his discourse. The true 
scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed 
by as a loss of power." 

His Concord life was no hermit's life, and though 
by force of character and constancy of effort and 
bravely saying No to many impertinent claims on 
his time, he guarded the time to do his work, yet 
labors and company found him out. In a letter to 
his brother William he says : — 

"Concord, February 12, 1838. 

" Now that the Boston lectures are over, comes 
a harvest of small works to be done which were 
adjourned to this day. ' Rest is nowhere for the 
son of Adam,' not even in Concord. The suds 
toss furiously in the wash-bowl. . . . [He tells of 



216 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

an article for tlie * North American Review,' to be 
prepared, reviews of Carlyle's books to be written, 
and his friend's last work (the ' Miscellanies ') now 
going to the press in this country, and that his own 
Oration at Concord in 1835 is to be revised for a 
new edition ; and continues] : And now I have to 
flee to Roxbury on a sudden call to pour out these 
decanters and demijohns of popular wisdom." 

This letter gives a just picture of the distractions 
of those days, so numerous and constant that they 
would have undone him as a writer if he had had 
less power of will. 

Of reading as a stimulus to writing (though far 
inferior to direct influences of men and nature, 
so that he always warned the scholar against too 
great subserviency, or awe for the reputation of 
any writer) he made use, but only when the 
richer sources were less accessible. But the book- 
ish instinct of his race was strong, and even while 
speaking slightingly of reading he breaks off and 
says : — 

(Journal, 1867.) ..." And yet — and yet — I 
hesitate to denounce reading as aught inferior or 
mean. When the visions of my books come over 
me as I sit writing, when the remembrance of some 
poet comes, I accept it with pure joy and quit my 
thinking as sad lumbering work, and hasten to my 
little heaven if it is then accessible, as angels might. 



VALUE OF SOLITUDE. 217 

For these social affections also are part of Nature 
and being, and the delight in another's superiority 
is, as Aunt Mary said [of herself], my best gift 
from God ; for here the moral nature is involved, 
which is higher than the intellectual." 

Society or Solitude ? These were ever balancing 
their claims to his gratitude for service done him. 
Writing to his friend, Mr. Samuel G, Ward, just 
before his second visit to Europe, he says ; — 

« March 25, 1847. 

" I am invited on some terms, not yet distinct 
and attractive enough, to England to lecture . . . 
and Carlyle promises audiences in London, but 
though I often ask where shall I get the whip for 
my top, I do not yet take either of these. [He had 
also spoken of invitations from Theodore Parker 
to take editorship of new Quarterly journal.] The 
top believes it can fly like the wheel of the Sisters 
with a poise like a planet and a hum like the sphe- 
ral music, yet it refuses to spin. I have read in 
The Cosmogenist that every atom has a spiral 
tendency, an effort to spin. I think over all shops 
of power where we might borrow that desiderated 
push, but none entirely suits me. The excursion 
to England and farther draws me sometimes, but 
the kind of travel-prize, the most liberal, that made 
it a liberty and a duty to go, is n't to be found in 



218 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

hospitable invitations, and if I should really do as 
I liked, I should probably turn towards Canada, 
into loneliest retreats, far from cities and friends 
who do not yield me what they would yield to any 
other companion. And I believe that literary 
power would be consulted by that course and not 
by public roads." 

The reader who could better spare the English 
Traits than the Wood-notes or May-day will per- 
haps agree with him. 

He had undertaken the task of speaking each 
year in the towns and villages throughout the 
growing country, to give the people high thoughts to 
help them amidst the turmoil, at a time when 
political speeches or humorous discourses or lec- 
tures on Temperance or Popular Science were ex- 
pected. 

Journal. " In my dream I saw a man reading 
in the library at Cambridge, and one who stood by 
said ' He readeth advertisements,' meaning that he 
read for the market only, and not for truth. Then 
I said, — Do I read advertisements ? " 

Almost all his essays, though modified before 
being printed, were first delivered as lectures, and 
he soon felt the need of guarding himself against 
any harmful effect of this circumstance. 

" 'T is very costly, this thinking for the market 
in books or lectures. Only what is private and 



RULES IN WRITING. 219 

yours and essential should ever be printed or spo- 
ken. I will buy the suppressed part of the author's 
mind : you are welcome to all he published." 

And yet when the stout Western farmer, after 
ten minutes' trial, got up and walked out of the 
lecture room, the circumstance always set the lec- 
turer thinking not what was lacking in the farmer, 
but why he had failed to find the ear and heart of 
his brother. 

But the lectures brought compensation in vari- 
ous forms : — 

1846. 

Journal. "What a discovery I made one day 
that the more I spent, the more I grew ; that it 
was as easy to occupy a large place and do much 
work as a small place and do little ; and that in 
the winter in which I communicated all my results 
to classes I was full of new thoughts." 

When the lectures were recast into essays, the 
final revision was severe ; he cut out and condensed 
heroically. He wished every word to tell, and 
liked to strengthen his sentence by omitting ad- 
jectives and superlatives. "Your work gains for 
every ' very ' you can cancel." " Don't italicise ; 
you should so write that the italics show without 
being there." "Beware of the words ' intense ' and 
' exquisite ' : to very few people would the occasion 
for the word ' intense ' come in a lifetime." " Use 



220 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

the strong Saxon word instead of the pedantic 
latinized one ; " — such were his counsels to young 
writers. ^ 

May, 1839. 

Journal. "• Our aim in our writings ought to be 
to make daylight shine through them. There is 
wide difference between compression and an ellip- 
tical style. The dense writer has yet ample room 
and choice of phrase and even a gamesome mood 
often between his noble words. There is no disa- 
greeable contraction in his sentence any more than 
there is in a human face, where in a square space 
of a few inches is found room for command and 
love and frolic and wisdom, and for the expression 
even of great amplitude of surface." 

In his letter to Rev. William H. Channing writ- 
ten in November, 1851, discussing the question 
where to introduce some contributions from out- 
siders to their joint work (with Rev. James Free- 
man Clarke) on Margaret Fuller, he says : — 

o . . " Only I hate to hear of swelling the book, 
and I think not Mazzini himself, not Cranch, not 
Browning hardly, would induce me to add a line 
of Appendix. Amputate, amputate. And why a 
preface ? If eight pages are there, let them be 

1 " In a letter," he would say, " any expressions may be abbre- 
viated rather than those of respect and kindness : never write 
'yours aff'ly. ' " 



EARLY VERSES. 221 

gloriously blank: No, no preface. ... I do not 
mean to write a needless syllable." 

As his productive power failed and his journals, 
the store-houses whence he drew his material, in- 
creased in number, his task became more perplex- 
ing. 

1864. 

Journal. " I have heard that the engineers on 
the locomotives grow nervously vigilant with every 
year on the road until the employment is intolera- 
ble to them ; and I think writing is more and more 
a terror to old scribes." 

The history of Mr. Emerson's progress in the 
poetic art may interest his friends and readers, and 
as in the many notices of him as a poet I have no- 
where seen it traced, I venture to bring forward 
my contribution. 

There seem to me to have been three epochs 
which I will call the youthful or imitative, the 
revolutionary, and the mature stages. From his 
early boyhood he delighted in the poets, but Apollo 
with the charms of rhythm and sonorous rhetorical 
passages first took his school-boy ear. Pope and 
Campbell seem to have been the early models. It 
is curious to observe, in view of the occasional 
defective ear for prosody which Mr. Emerson 
showed and carelessness of exact rhyme, that the 
early rhyming verses usually scan perfectly and 



222 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

rhyme satisfactorily, though the blank verse more 
often halts. There is seldom a bold and original 
stroke at this time. His mind was of the order 
that awaken late. The personified virtues and 
vices and attributes of man do obvious things in 
these rather grandiloquent verses. The Class Poem, 
though simpler than others of this period, was of 
this sort. Sonorousness and an ambitious move- 
ment characterized this epoch. Here is an exam- 
ple of verses written at the age of seventeen : — 

" When bounding Fancy leaves the clods of Earth 
To riot in the regions of her birth ; 
When, robed in light, the genii of the stars 
Launch in refulgent space their diamond cars ; 
Or in pavilions of celestial pride 
Serene above all influence beside 
Vent the bold joy which swells the glorious soul 
Rich with the rapture of secure control ; 
Onward, around, their golden visions sway 
Till only glory can obscure the day," etc. 

This flight must have been one of the happy 
occasions which the youth, eager to ride Pegasus, 
referred to in the opening lines of a long poem : — 

" Oh, there are times when the celestial Muse 
Will bless the dull with inspiration's hues." 

There is however an indication of having risen 
beyond the imitative period, and of the approach 
of Emerson's emancipation from tradition and new 
departure in thought in the following lines, though 
clothed in a most sophomorical complacency : — 



PHI BETA KAPPA POEM. 223 

" When Fortune decks old Learning's naked shrine 
And bids his cobwebbed libraries be fine, 
Young Merit smooths his aspect to a smile 
And fated Genius deigns to live a while." 

His poem delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa 
Society at Cambridge in 1834 shows a marked gain 
in originality, simplicity and vigor of language, and 
the Muse and the personified qualities and ideas, 
Hope, Memory, Passion and innumerable others, al- 
most invariably present in force in the early work, 
are happily kept in the background. Still, the ad- 
vance since the Class Poem of 1821 was not very 
great, and the tribute to Lafayette, who had just 
died, and the lines to Webster (printed in the Ap- 
pendix of the posthumous edition of his poems) are 
the only passages of interest. The discouragements 
and bodily ailments in the years in which he stud- 
ied for the ministry, the sickness of Ellen Tucker, 
her death, his own parting with his parish, and 
broken health and uncertain future were reflected 
in the verses written between 1827 and 1834. 
They are sad and introspective, although there are 
here and there gleams of happiness and beauty, as 
in the verses to Ellen, and some others in which 
his growing desire finds voice to become possessed 
of the power which he felt that the poet, of all 
other men, had in fullest measure, to reach the 
hearts of the human race. In these last there is 
no trace of the eighteenth century poets, nor even 



224 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

of Milton and Wordsworth, who had influenced 
the verses of the years just preceding. He is com- 
ing to his own strength, and here and there are 
daring and fortunate flights, yet not sustained. It 
is strange to see him return to safe and monotonous 
heroics in the Phi Beta Kappa poem, when some 
scraps of verse (the beginnings of " The Poet ") 
written before this time, showed freedom and power. 
He himself at the time spoke slightingly of this 
performance (the Phi Beta Kappa poem), but 
probably he felt that his new wings were not yet 
strong enough for a long flight. 

But that year was the beginning of a new era 
with him. He had returned from exile with 
healthy body and mind, he had gone to Nature for 
inspiration and forever turned his back on all that 
was morbid. The self-dissection so common among 
aspirants in poetry he abhorred henceforth. He 
was now fully awakened and charged with life. 
A man must not live with his eyes glued to his 
navel. " Show me thy face, dear Nature," he cried, 
" that I may forget my own." 

In the next ten years the greatest portion of his 
life's work was done, but though he felt that the 
poet was born in him, and by day and night yearned 
thus to give his message in this, the abiding form, 
he knew that the expression halted, and his first 
volume of poetry, by no means satisfactory to him, 
did not appear until 1847. 



THE POET. 225 

** Not yet, not yet, 
Impatient friend, — 
A little while attend ; 
Not yet I sing ; but I must wait 
My hand upon the silent string 
Fully until the end. 
I see the coming light, 
I see the scattered gleams, 
Aloft, beneath, on left and right 
The stars' own ether beams ; 
These are but seeds of days, 
Not yet a steadfast morn, 
An intermittent blaze, 
An embryo god unborn. 
How all things sparkle. 
The dust is alive. 
To the birth they arrive : 
I snuff the breath of my morning afar, 
I see the pale lustres condense to a star ; 
The fading colors fix, 
The vanishing are seen. 
And the world that shall be 
Twins the world that has been. 
I know the appointed hour, 
I greet my office well. 
Never faster, never slower 
Revolves the fatal wheel ! 
The Fairest enchants me. 
The Mighty commands me, 
Saying, ' Stand in thy place ; 
Up and eastward turn thy face ; 
As mountains for the morning wait, 
Coming early, coming late. 
So thou attend the enriching Fate 



226 EMERSON IN CONCORD, 

Which none can stay, and none accelerate.' 
I am neither faint nor weary 
FiU thy will, O faultless heart ! 
Here from youth to age I tarry, — 
Count it flight of bird or dart. 
My heart at the heart of things 
Heeds no longer lapse of time, 
Rushing ages moult their wings 
Bathing in thy day sublime." 

Much of his inner life appears in the history of 
this ideal poet, his inspirations, obstructions, his 
strivings and experiences in his pursuit of the 
Goddess. If only for this reason his fragments on 
the Poet and the Poetic Gift, begun under the title 
of The Discontented Poet, a Masque, soon after 
1830, and added to through his whole life-time, 
but never brought into form, — it seemed wrong 
to withhold, and with Mr. Cabot's sanction they 
were introduced into the Appendix of the edition 
of my father's poems published since his death. 
He usually calls the poet Seyd or Saadi, and he, 
like Osman in the journals, is now the ideal, now 
the actual self. 

During the years when in his addresses to the 
rising generation. Nature, the American Scholar, 
The Divinity School Address, he was urging them 
not to tie their fresh lives to a dead past, but to 
trust themselves, or rather, the universal virtue 
and power which would well up in due measure in 
each soul that dared trust its aspirations, — most 



BREAKING THE BONDS. 227 

of the poems included in his first volume were 
written. The tide of reaction against the aca- 
demic, perhaps even the classic, was setting in 
strongly. The poetry of the day should be free as 
the singing of a bird. The song of the redwing 
rings out from the willows and gladdens the chilly 
April day, but what would it be if it strove to 
repeat the note of the European skylark ? 

But the tide of protest of those days, the so- 
caUed transcendental period, ran strong and some- 
times carried Mr. Emerson into fantastic and start- 
ling imagery and rude expression. It is almost 
incredible that his ear and taste should have toler- 
ated for an instant some lines in the Sphinx as it 
was first published in the Dial. He believed with 
Burke that " much must be pardoned to the spirit 
of Liberty," and he was very tender of the unreg- 
ulated poetical flights of the young emancipated 
of those days, although these afforded an unhal- 
lowed delight to the conservative spirits who made 
successful and amusing imitations of the Transcen- 
dentalist poetry. 

June 27, 1839. 

Journal. " Rhyme ; not tinkling rhyme, but 
grand Pindaric strokes as firm as the tread of a 
horse. Rhyme that vindicates itself as an art, the 
stroke of the bell of a cathedral. Rhyme which 
knocks at prose and dulness with the stroke of a 
cannon-ball. Rhyme which builds out into Chaos 



228 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

and old Night a splendid architecture to bridge the 
impassable and call aloud on all the children of 
morning that the Creation is recommencing. I 
wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a 
restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom." 

Then he had come to the conclusive belief that 
when the spirit moved, the thought came, the bard 
must sing ; while he was at white heat the expres- 
sion would take care of itself ; that the impulse, 
the intoxication, if you will, must be trusted to find 
itself words, and that the force would be lost by 
elaboration ; that power was almost surely sacri- 
ficed by too careful attempts at finish.^ Of course 
then the chances in the lottery of making a good 
poem were made far smaller if expression both 
strong and musical must come with the first voicing 
of the thought or never. Both the good and the 
evil of this theory show in the poems of the first 
edition of his first volume, best of all in the poems 
printed in the Dial, for much could not stand his 

1 When Leaves of Grass appeared, at a later period than 
that of which I speak, the healthy vigor and freedom of this 
work of a young" mechanic seemed to promise so much that Mr. 
Emerson overlooked the occasional coarseness which offended 
him, and wrote a letter of commendation to the author, a sen- 
tence of which was, to his annoyance, printed in gold letters on 
the covers of the next edition. But the first work led him to 
expect better in future, and in this he was disappointed. He 
used to say, This ' Catalogue-style of poetry is easy and leads 
nowhere,' or words to that effect. 



THE OLD BARDS. 229 

own or his friends' criticism and was struck out 
or amended. 

At this time he came upon the translations of 
the old Bardic poetry, the fragments attributed 
to Taliessin, Llewarch Hen, and even to Merlin, 
and he tasted with joy the inspiring wild flavor 
after the insipid or artificial fruit of England in 
the last century. He was reading too the rude 
chan tings of the Norse Scalds and the improvisa- 
tions of the Trouveurs. 

Fortunately he had no affectation of ruggedness. 
What there was was sincere, like all his life, and 
in the direction of simplicity. A wilfully involved 
style, like Browning's later work, was odious to 
him. Even Brahma and Uriel, which are noted 
stumbling-blocks to those who come on them be- 
fore they are familiar with Mr. Emerson's leading 
thoughts, which they embody (Compensation and 
Good out of Evil in the one, and the Universal 
Mind coming to consciousness now in this human 
vessel, now in that, in the other poem), are short, 
perfectly simple in construction and as Saxon in 
style as even Byron's best work. What Moore 
wrote of Campbell (and Emerson calls his best 
verse) expressed his own view of the race of 
poets : — 

" True bard and simple, as the race 
Of Heaven-born poets always are, 
When leaning from their starry place 
They 're children near, but gods afar." 



230 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

Yet the poet must raise the people, not write 
down to them. " Sing he must and should, but not 
ballads ; sing, but for gods or demigods. He need 
not transform himself into Punch and Judy." 

First of all he must have something to say, then 
lay it out largely ; a great design, not a pretty 
piece of upholstery. Then it must have the out- 
door wholesomeness, sincerity and cheer about it, 
for is not the poet "permitted to dip his brush 
into the old paint-pot with which birds, j&owers, the 
human cheek, the living rock, the broad landscape, 
the ocean and the eternal sky were painted," and 
should he paint affectations and nightmares ? From 
the first riot of freedom and rough spontaneity in 
verse, after the cramping models of his youth, there 
would have been almost necessarily a reaction, even 
had not this new fashion run into extremes in his 
own and others' hands which served the wholesome 
purpose of caricature. His own improving ear and 
taste felt the need of more music. To be treasured 
by mankind verses must not have weight merely, 
but beauty ; rough pebbles must not be strung 
with the gems, even if seized in the same first 
eager grasp. The gems can be kept and laid by 
until that other lucky day when enough others are 
found to fill out the necklace. 

" Substance is much," he says ; " but so are mode 
and form much. The poet, like a delighted boy, 
brings you heaps of rainbow bubbles, opaline, air- 



THE RIPER POETRY. 231 

born, spherical as the world, instead of a few drops 
of soap and water." 

Another influence now came in on the side of 
grace and finish, the Oriental poetry, in which he 
took very great interest, especially the poems of 
Hafiz, many of which he rendered into English 
from the German or French translations in which 
he found them. 

The verses of the late period (after 1847) were 
long kept by him, and on fortunate days as he 
crooned the lines to himself, walking in Walden 
woods, the right words sprang into place. 

1853. 

Journal. " I amuse myself often as I walk with 
humming the rhythm of the decasyllabic quatrain 
or of the octosyllabic or other rhythms, and believe 
these metres to be organic or derived from our 
human pulse, and to be therefore not proper to one 
nation, but to mankind. But I find a wonderful 
charm, heroic and especially deeply pathetic or 
plaintive in the cadence, and say to myself, Ah 
happy ! if one could fill the small measures with 
words approaching to the power of these beats. 
Young people like rhyme, drum-beat, tune, things 
in pairs and alternatives, and in higher degrees we 
know the instant power of music upon our temper- 
aments to change our mood and give us its own ; 
and human passion, seizing these constitutional 
tunes, aims to fill them with appropriate words, or 



232 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

marry music to thought, believing, as we believe of 
all marriage, that matches are made in heaven, and 
that for every thought its proper melody or rhyme 
exists, though the odds are immense against our 
finding it, and only genius can rightly say the 
banns." 

Almost all the poems of the later volume had 
been in years greatly changed and mellowed from 
the song struggling for expression first written in 
the note-book on his return from the woods, where 
I believe that nearly all his poems had their birth. 
But a woodland flavor remained : " Pan is a god, 
and Apollo is no more," and Pan and the sylvan 
deities were only half emerged from shaggy brute 
forms, and even the fair Dryads and Oreads had 
hints of rugged bark or rock-lichen in their garb. 

Yet the first thought mainly gave the form, for, 
though in happy moments he bettered the expres- 
sion, he taught that " verse was not a vehicle. The 
verse must be alive and inseparable from its con- 
tents, as the soul of man inspires and directs the 
body." 

May-Day, Waldeinsamkeit, and especially My 
Garden show the result of this later, riper method. 

The journal of 1856 shows The Two Rivers, 
perhaps the most musical of his poems, as the 
thought first came to him by the river-bank and 
was then brought into form. 



HISTORY OF POEMS. 233 

**Thy voice is sweet Masketaquid and repeats the music of 
the rain, but sweeter is the silent stream which flows even 
through thee, as thou through the land. 

" Thou art shut in thy banks, but the stream I love flows in 
thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air and 
through rays of light as well, and through darkness, and 
through men and women. 

" I hear and see the inundation and the eternal spending 
of the stream in winter and in summer, in men and animals, 
in passion and thought. Happy are they who can hear it." 

" I see thy brimming, eddying stream 
And thy enchantment. 
For thou changest every rock in thy bed 
Into a gem. 
All is opal and agate. 
And at will thou pavest with diamonds : 
Take them away from the stream 
And they are poor shards and flints. 
So is it with me to-day." 

This rhapsody does not gain by the attempt to 
reduce part of it to rhyme which occurs later in 
the same journal : — - 

" Thy murmuring voice, Musketaquit, 
Repeats the music of the rain, 
But sweeter rivers silent flit 

Through thee as thou through Concord plain. 

" Thou in thy banks must dwell, 
But 

The stream I follow freely flows 
Through thee, through rocks, through air as well, 
Through light, through men it gayly goes." 



234 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

At last the thought found its perfect form in 

THE TWO RIVERS. 

* * Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, 
Repeats the music of the rain ; 
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit 

Through thee, as thou through Concord plain. 

" Thou in thy narrow banks art pent ; 
The stream I love unbounded goes 
Through flood and sea and firmament ; 

Through light, through life, it forward flows. 

" I see the inundation sweet, 

I hear the spending of the stream 
Through years, through men, through nature fleet. 
Through love and thought, through power and dream. 

" Musketaquit, a goblin strong, 

Of shard and flint makes jewels gay ; 
They lose their grief who hear his song, 
And where he winds is the day of day. 

" So forth and brighter fares my stream, — 
Who drink it shall not thirst again ; 
No darkness stains its equal gleam 
And ages drop in it like rain." 

The representations of the beauty of the coast 
near Cape Ann, by his friend Doctor Bartol, led 
my father thither for a week with his family. The 
day after his return to Concord he entered my 
mother's room, where all of us were sitting, with 



THE SEASHORE. 235 

his journal in his hand, and said, " I came in yes- 
terday from walking on the rocks, and wrote down 
what the sea had said to me ; and to-day when I 
open my book I find that it all reads in blank 
verse, with scarcely a change. Listen ! " and he 
read it to us. Here is the passage from the jour- 
nal, which needed little alteration, part of which he 
made while reading, for its final form " The Sea- 
shore " : — 

" July 23. Returned from Pigeon Cove, where 
we have made acquaintance with the sea, for seven 
days. 'T is a noble friendly power, and seemed to 
say to me. Why so late and slow to come to me ? 
Am I not here always, thy proper summer home ? 
Is not my voice thy needful music ; my breath thy 
healthful climate in the heats ; my touch thy cure ? 
Was ever building like my terraces? Was ever 
couch so magnificent as mine ? Lie down on my 
warm ledges and learn that a very little hut is all 
you need. I have made this architecture super- 
fluous, and it is paltry beside mine. Here are 
twenty Romes and Ninevehs and Karnacs in ruins 
together, obelisk and pyramid and Giants' Cause- 
way, here they all are, prostrate or half - piled. 
And behold the sea, the opaline, plentiful and 
strong, yet beautiful as the rose or the rainbow, 
full of food, nourisher of men, purger of the world, 
creating a sweet climate, and in its unchangeable 
ebb and flow, and in its beauty at a few furlongs, 



/ 



236 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

giving a hint of that which changes not, and is 
perfect." 

There is a little poem in prose written in the 
journal of 1855, which, as I do not find it else- 
where, I will insert here. 

^^ /the year. 

" There is no flower so sweet as the four-petalled 
flower which science much neglects ; one grey petal it 
has, one green, one red, and one white." 

" Days " has been, by some readers, held to be 
the best of my father's poems. There is a remark- 
able entry about its production in the journal for 
1852 : — 

" I find one state of mind does not remember or 
conceive of another state. Thus I have written 
within a twelvemonth verses (Days) which I do 
not remember the composition or correction of, and 
could not write the like to-day, and have only for 
proof of their being mine various external evi- 
dences, as the manuscripts in which I find them, 
and the circumstances that I have sent copies of 
them to friends, etc. Well, if they had been bet- 
ter, if it had been a noble poem, perhaps it would 
have only more entirely taken up the ladder into 
heaven." 

Rev. William R. Alger tells me that meeting 
Mr. Emerson in Boston streets soon after the 
publication of May Day he expressed to him his 



THE OFFICE OF THE POET. 23T 

pleasure in the book, adding that much as he 
valued the essays he cared more for the poems. 
Mr. Emerson answered laughingly, " I beg you 
always to remain of that opinion ; " then went on 
more seriously to say that he himself liked his 
poems best because it was not he who wrote them ; 
because he could not write them by will ; — he 
could say, " I will write an essay." He added, 
" I can breathe at any time, but I can only whistle 
when the right pucker comes." ^ 

Having indicated the traces of his passage 
through the stages of his advance in the art of 
poetry, I shall venture to state in as short space as 
I can his feeling about the poet's place and duty 
in the world, or rather his high privilege. At 

^ Two poems are often ascribed to Mr. Emerson which he did 
not write. The first, called The Future is Better than the 
Past, appeared in the Dial. Part of this poem, beginning 

" All before us lies the way," 

appears in several collections of hymns under my father's name. 
This was due to a mistake by the Reverend Doctor Frederic 
Hedge, who was one of the Compilers of " Hynms for the Church," 
from which it has been copied into other collections. The poem 
was contributed to the Dial, at Mr. Emerson's request, by Miss 
Eliza T. Clapp of Dorchester. 

The second pleasing poem, of which Mr. Emerson has wrongly 
the credit, is one called Midsummer, beginning 

" Round this lovely valley rise 
The purple hills of Paradise." 

It was written by Mr. J. T. Trowbridge, 



238 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

large through his writings hints of this creed are 
found, but better even than in the long chapter on 
Poetry and Imagination, in the poems Saadi, Mer- 
lin and the fragments on the Poet and the Poetic 
Gift in the Appendix to the last edition of his 
poems. 

The poet is finely sensitive to impressions from 
Nature and from Man. The beauty of objects and 
events is borne in upon him from moment to mo- 
ment — observe, not mere objects, but their won- 
derful histories. " Natural objects are not known 
out of their connection ; they are words of a sen- 
tence : if their true order is found, the poet can 
read their divine significance as orderly as in a 
Bible." He must render this beauty into words to 
gladden men elsewhere and at another time. To 
present vividly to their imaginations that which he 
has seen, he shows its likeness to some other fine 
thing or striking event which they know. The 
resemblances which he sees, new and unthought of 
but by him, make his hearer see what he saw. 
These images seem most fortunate ; " The world 
seems only a disguised man, so readily does it lend 
itself to tropes." But soon he sees that these 
likenesses were far too fortunate to be coincidences, 
but due to the great fact that mind and mat 
ter have like history. " Detecting essential resem- 
blances in things never before compared, he can 
class them so audaciously because he is sensible of 



THE SPIRITUAL IS THE REAL. 239 

the sweep of the celestial stream from which noth- 
ing is exempt." 

*' The things whereon he cast his eyes 
Could not the nations re-baptize 
Nor Time's snows hide the names he set 
Nor last posterity forget." 

Nature symbolizes the soul, for behind both are 
the great laws. Action and reaction, attraction 
and repulsion, compensation and periodicity, and 
transformation and reappearance alike hold sway 
over man and nature. 

" The sun and moon shall fall amain 
Like sower's seeds into his brain, 
There quickened to be born again.'* 

" And the poet affirms the laws : prose busies 
itself with exceptions, with the local and individ- 
ual," but he, having taken the true central point of 
observation, sees that harmony and progress are 
the rule, as did Copernicus when he found that all 
the apparent perturbations and retrogressions of 
the heavenly bodies were due to the assumption of 
a false centre, and that, as seen from the sun, all 
would be orderly and harmonious. " The senses 
imprison us. ... It cost thousands of years to 
make the motion of the earth suspected. Slowly, 
by comparing thousands of observations, there 
dawned on some mind a theory of the sun, — and 
we found the astronomical fact, But the astron- 



240 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

omy is in the mind. The senses affirm that the 
earth stands still and the sun moves." 

Thus the great " poetry is the only verity ; is the 
speech of man after the real, and not after the 
apparent. The solid men complain that the ideal- 
ist leaves out the fundamental facts ; the poet com- 
plains that the solid men leave out the sky ; " yes 
and the system in which grains of city dust and 
incandescent sun are alike motes. 

Hence " poetry is the consolation of mortal men 
who have been cabined, cribbed, confined in a 
narrow and trivial lot." In it is 

" Something that gives our feeble light 
A high immunity from night, 

Something that leaps life's narrow bars 
To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven, 
A seed of sunshine that doth leaven 

Our earthly dulness with the beams of stars, 
And glorify our clay 
With light from fountains elder than the day." ^ 

By reading the law behind seeming fact the 
Poet cheers and points the way when it seems dark, 
as the guide who takes his course by the stars when 
the road winds and baffles him. Seeing the beauty 
and harmony of the universe and that our great 
solid earth is but a transient mote in it, our ideas 
are freed and we can look on death more calmly, 
surmising that " the noble house of Nature which 

^ Lowell's " Commemoration Ode." 



THE POET CHEERS, CREATES. 241 

we inhabit has temporary uses and that we can 
afford to leave it one day, as great conquerors have 
burned their ships when once landed on the wished- 
for shore." Even the poetry of sorrow has a charm 
for mankind. Thus happiness attends poetry ; 
happiness not merely of the singer, but the hearer ; 
and because poetry gilds the days, in rhyme you 
may say anything, even ideal truth, in the heart of 
Philistia. 

At last the poet comes through poetry to central 
truth. For having found under manifold matter 
fewer forces, and under these a few great laws, 
the last step, uniting these, is to the essence, the 
Truth, Love, Beauty which thus expresses itself, the 
central fire of Thought and Virtue and Will of 
which his own is but a spark. 

And this spark is not in vain, for is not the 
Poet too a creator, a Maker, as the Greek called 
him ? " A poem is a new work of nature as a man 
is," and accordingly valued. " It must be new as 
foam and old as the rock." The poet takes " con- 
versation and objects in nature and gives back, not 
them but a new and transcendent whole." Driven 
by his thought he personifies it, and in a crisis 
gives to the men of the street such a presentation 
of the Church or of their Country, that these once 
visionary abstractions become the realities that, 
make life worth living, nay, even to be thrown as 
dust into the balance to save them: and a soiled 



242 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

and ragged bit of bunting may outweigh with 
them a thousand bales of cotton. 

And the true poet need not go back for pictu- 
resque subjects to mythical or classic or mediaeval 
periods. He can take the passing day of the rush- 
ing, materialistic nineteenth century and hold it up 
to the divine reason and show the practical man 
whose eyes are on gingham or the county vote or 
the stock market the relation of these things to the 
far horizon that rings them in, and to the long " bal- 
ance-beam of Fate ; " — *' the dry twig blossoms in 
his hand." " Perhaps they may think themselves 
logical and the poet whimsical ? Do they think 
there is chance and wilfulness in what he sees and 
tells? . . . He knows that he did not make his 
thought. No, his thoughts made him and made 
the sun and the stars." 

" Ah, not to me those dreams belong ; 
A better voice peals through my song." 

A noble or fine thought, a piece of the poet's real 
experience given in a happy image, is the essence 
of a poem, and not a mere dazzle of w^ords and 
melody, — a gay upholstery. The beautiful form 
is secondary, but should be implied in the beau- 
tiful thought, for " the act of imagination is a 
pure delight ; " in this intoxication all things 
swim, the musical lines and words should come ; 
for Nature, herself but the expression of Mind, by 



RHYTHM AND RHYME IN NATURE. 243 

her returns, of planets or o£ seasons, and her 
beautiful echoes to ear and to eye gives the hint 
of rhythm and rhyme. 

" Every one may see, as he rides on the highway 
through an uninteresting landscape, how a little 
water instantly relieves the monotony : no matter 
what objects are near it, they become beautiful by 
being reflected. It is rhyme to the eye and ex- 
plains the charm of rhyme to the ear. Shadows 
please us as still finer rhymes." 

So metre and movement, rhythm and rhyme fitly 
and necessarily lend themselves to the poet when 
he celebrates the symmetry, harmony, the depar- 
tures and returns, the correspondence and recom- 
pense, substance and shadow, life and death. 

" And through man and woman and sea and star 
Saw the dance of Nature forward and far, 
Through worlds and races and terms and times 
Saw musical order and pairing rhymes." 

The beauty, the harmonies of the universe every- 
where await the poet to celebrate them. 

" Chladne's experiment seems to me central. He 
strewed sand on glass and then struck the glass 
with tuneful accords, and the sand assumed sym- 
metrical figures. With discords the sand was 
thrown about amorphously. It seems, then, that 
Orpheus is no fable ; you have only to sing and 
the rocks will crystallize ; sing and the plant will 
organize ; sing and the animal will be born." 



244 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

But tlie ideal " poetry must be affirmative. TTius 
saith the Lord should begin the song." " A poet 
gives us the eminent experiences onlj^, — a god 
stepping from peak to peak, nor planting his foot 
but on a mountain." 

He felt that a better poetry was to come. 

1851. 
Journal. " There is something, — our brothers 
over the sea do not know it or own it ; Scott, 
Southey, Hallam, and Dickens would all deny and 
blaspheme it, — which is setting them all aside, 
and the whole world also, and planting itself for- 
ever and ever." 

The insight of a poet was the ladder by which he 
climbed to the plane of Optimism, the constant 
occupation of which by him disturbs some of his 
readers. And so his hope — or trust, as he rather 
called it, for there was, he said, a lower suggestion 
in the word hope — which was with him in his 
early days of poverty and sickness, grew until he 
felt that Uriel, the Archangel of the Sun, who 
from the centre of the universe sees all motion and 
tendency, saw that all things came in turn to light 
and worked for good and the great harmony. 
Even the comet flying off apparently in a straight 
line into space would in after ages return, as it 
might seem from infinity, and from another part of 
the heavens. 



GOOD OUT OF EVIL. 245 

" Line in Nature is not found ; 
Unit and universe are round : 
In vain produced, all rays return ; 
Evil will bless, and ice will burn." 

This poem, written soon after his Divinity School 
address, might almost stand as the history of his 
promulgation of his steadfastly held belief of Good 
out of Evil, the study and illustration of which 
gave joy to his life. Although it can be traced in 
the greater part of my father's utterances quoted 
in this sketch, I will give a few more in special 
illustration. 

" I see with joy the Irish emigrants landing at 
Boston, at New York, and say to myself: There 
they go — to school." 

" Not Antoninus, but a poor washerwoman, said, 
' The more trouble, the more lion.' " 

" A man must thank his defects and stand in 
some terror of his talents." 

" Hear what the Morning says and believe that." 

" I cannot look without seeing splendor and 
grace. How idle to choose a random sparkle here 
and there, when the indwelling necessity plants the 
rose of beauty on the brow of Chaos and discloses 
the central intention of Nature to be harmony and 

joy." 

" I find the gayest castles in the air which were 
ever piled far better for comfort and for use than 
the dungeons in the air that are daily dug and 



246 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

caverned out by grumbling and discontented peo- 
ple." 

" God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins 
of churches and religions." 

" Trust the time : what a fatal prodigality to con- 
demn our age ; we cannot overvalue it. It is our 
all. As the wandering sea-bird, which, crossing 
the ocean, alights on some rock or isle to rest for a 
moment its wings and to look back on the wilder- 
ness of waves behind and onward to the wilderness 
of waters before, — so stand we, perched on this 
rock or shoal of time — arrived out of the im- 
mensity of the past, bound and road-ready to 
plunge into immensity again. Not for nothing it 
dawns out of everlasting Peace, this great discon- 
tent, this self -accusing Reflection. The very time 
sees for us, thinks for us. It is a microscope such 
as Philosophy never had. Insight is for us which 
was never for any, and doubt not the moment and 
the opportunity are divine. 

Wondering we came into this lodge of watch- 
men, this office of espial. We wonder at the re- 
sult, but let us not retreat astonished and ashamed. 
Let us go out of the Hall door, and doubt never 
that a Good Genius brought us in and will carry 
us out. 

" As I stand hovering over this gloom and deep 
of the Future, and consider earnestly what it fore- 
bodes, I cannot dismiss my joyful auguries. For 1 



RELIGION. 247 

will not and cannot see in it a fiction oy a dream. 
It is a reality arriving. It is to me an oracle that 
I cannot bring myself to undervalue. It is the 
cloud temple of the Highest." 

My presentation of my father's life in the pic- 
tures here brought together of his daily v^alk among 
his own people and the thoughts thereby suggested 
to him will have been in vain if the agreement of 
his acts with his words has not everywhere ap- 
peared, — the symmetry and harmony of his life. 

Religion was not with him something apart, a 
separate attitude of the mind, or function, but so 
instant and urgent that it led him out of the 
churches, which then seemed to him its tomb, into 
the living day, and he said, " Nature is too thin a 
screen : the glory of the One breaks in every- 
where." 

And so it seems hardly worth while to pick out 
from his writings chapters with names suggestive 
of religion or moral philosophy and group them 
to show his creed, as has been proposed since his 
death. Under the most diverse titles his faith in 
ideal truth and beauty and the supremacy of the 
moral law appears, though he turned his back on 
what seemed formal and lifeless. He said, " I 
look on sceptics and unbelievers not as unbeliev- 
ers but as critics ; believers all must be." 

But when he was taken possession of by a 



248 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

thought he took care to present it vividly, and, 
that it might burn itself in upon reader or hearer, 
he did not soften or qualify, feeling that he was 
showing an aspect, a single glittering facet of 
truth and reserving for another paragraph or even 
essay the other side of the question, the correla- 
tive fact. Hence his writings are particularly ill 
adapted for taking out a single quotation as a final 
statement. Churchman and Agnostic could each 
find in his writings an armory of weapons against 
the other, by culling sentences or expressions here 
and there. A superficial reading of one essay 
might mislead, but further study shows certain 
lines of thought that underlie all : they occur in 
early writings, wax as the traditional ideas wane 
with the growth of his mind, and before 1840 he 
seems to have rested in a security that could never 
after be disturbed in the main articles of his happy 
belief, and thereafter all that came to him but illus- 
trated or confirmed or expanded it. 

He believed in Spirit, not in forms, and said, 
" The true meaning of Spiritual is — Real." 
Those around him he saw anxious for the husk 
which hid the core from their eyes, but he said. If 
God lives, he is this last moment as strong as in 
the dawn of things ; look then to the living centre 
and not to the deciduous clothing. The creature 
must have direct relation with the Creator and all 
interposition or mediation is a slur on the Al- 
mighty. 



ILLUSIONS OF MATTER. 249 

His experience of forms was that they cramped 
him ; a growing tree must break the encircling 
iron band or suffer for it. In 1834, having shaken 
off what he felt as fetters to his mind and soul, 
and with body sound once more come among these 
fields where he could find the serene solitude that 
he needed, he sat down to study great Nature. Be- 
fore he crossed the ocean he found his grief begin 
to heal in her presence, and in travel afar he had 
not found what he was seeking. He daily went 
out from the four walls of his study to his larger 
study in the woods, recorded what he saw, but 
largely, not as a final fact, — as it were, with a pin 
through it, — but as an appearance, a suggestion, 
a parable, surely with wisdom behind it. He saw 
light, flowers, shadow on solid rock, but what he 
noted was, that the light glanced, the flower un- 
folded, the shadow passed, and even the rock was 
crumbling under the tooth of the air to pass into 
soil, then flower, then seed, then man : that all 
was flowing and new each moment. 

He saw what the Greek saw and embodied in 
the fable of the sea-god Proteus, who, when seized, 
changed rapidly from one form to another until 
the captor, bewildered, let his prey escape. Beau- 
tiful, healthy, self -renewing, ever-shifting life he 
saw was in all things, and he said, — What need of 
a break ? This goes on. Here is the whole fact. 
Heaven is here and now, or nowhere and never. 



250 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

He found that his best thoughts came when he 
was reverently passive, and that presently he found 
the same thought, or its counterpart, in a friend, 
and said. We are the vessels ; the Spirit is the 
same.^ " God enters the mind by channels that 
the individual never left open." Hence his essay 
on Self-Reliance, which has been called the lowest 
note in his philosophy, rightly read, is the highest 
note. He explains it, after his manner, elsewhere, 
and says that one comes at last to learn " That 
self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is 
reliance on God." ^ And again he says : — 

" A man should be a guest in his own house and 
a guest in his own thought. He is there to speak 
for truth ; but who is he ? Some clod the truth 
has snatched from the ground and with fire has 
fashioned to a momentary man. Without the 
truth he is a clod again." 

His eye saw nothing but instances of existing, 
ever-renewed creative force, whether in the stars, 
or the Concord woods, or the working of the mind, 
and he reported it with delight, feeling sure that 

^ In his journal, after his oration before the Phi Beta Kappa 
Society in 1837, he writes : "It was the happiest tvirn to my old 
thrum which Charles Henry Warren gave as a toast at the Phi 
Beta Kappa dinner. ' Mr. President,' he said, ' I suppose all 
know where the Orator comes from ; and I suppose all know what 
he has said. I give you — The Spirit of Concord — it makes us 
all of one mind.' " 

2 Anti-Slavery Address in New York, March 7, 1854. 



GOD BEHIND ALL THINGS. 251 

this living faith must supplant what he called in 
his journal " the corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brat- 
tle Street." This was affirmative ; that confined 
itself to " pale negations." More than this, he 
recognized the still small voice as God in us. 

M. Eene de Poyen Belleisle said, " Whatever 
be the subject treated by Emerson, whatever be his 
position on the circumference, we are always sure 
that he will follow the ray which infallibly leads 
him to the centre ; God is all, in all, and every- 
where." 

But the faithful were not ready and said. It is 
Pantheism. So it was, but of a kind that hardly 
differs from the teaching of Omnipresent God in 
whom we live and move and have our being. 

And he saw that in nature Beauty was every- 
where inseparable from living creation, and all his 
life held that there can be no divorce between high 
intellect and morals but to the loss of the former. 
Beauty, Goodness, Wisdom, became in his mind 
terms as closely connected, almost equivalent, as 
heat, motion, chemical action are to the physicist. 

Nowhere have I seen so perfect an apprehension 
of this basal thought of all my father's work, the 
secret of the joy and calm of his life, as is shown 
by the late Sidney Lanier in his last lecture at the 
Johns Hopkins University, printed after his death 
in the Century Magazine (May, 1883), called 
Moral Purpose in Art. From it I quote the fol- 
lowing passages : — 



252 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

" It is most instructive to note how the fine and 
beautiful souls of all time appear after a while to 
lose all sense of distinction between these terms, — 
Beauty, Truth, Love, Wisdom, Goodness, and the 
like. Hear some testimony on this point. . . . 
Keats does not hesitate to draw a moral even from 
the Grecian Urn, and even in the very climacteric 
of his most ' high-sorrowful song ' ; and that moral 
effaces the distinction between truth and beauty. . . . 

" * When old age shall this generation waste, 
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe 
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst 
"Beauty is truth, truth, beauty," — that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' 

Again, bearing in mind this identity of truth 
and beauty in Keats's view, observe how Emerson 
by strange turns of thought subtly refers both truth 
and beauty to a common principle of the essential 
relation of each thing to all things in the universe." 
[He quotes from the poem Each and All and goes 
on : — ] 

** * Nothing is fair or good alone : * 

That is to say, fairness, or beauty, and goodness 
depend upon relations between creatures. . . . Let 
us now carry forward this connection between love 
and beauty ... in a poem called The Celestial 
Love, where instead of identifying heauty and 
truths with Keats, we find him making love and 



TRUTH, LOVE, BEAUTY, ARE ONE. 253 

truth to be one." [He quotes the passage begin- 
ning : — 

"Love's hearts are faithful, but not fond."] 

..." But now let me once more turn the tube 
and gain another radiant arrangement of these 
kaleidoscopic elements, beauty and love and the 
like. In Emerson's poem called Beauty (which 
must be distinguished from the Ode to Beauty) 
the relation between love and beauty takes this 
turn. Of Seyd he says : — 

" * Beauty chased he everywhere, 
In flame, in storm, in clouds of air. 

While thus to love he gave his days 
In loyal worship, scorning praise, 
How spread their lures for him in vain 
Thieving Ambition and paltering Gain ! 
He thought it happier to be dead, 
To die for Beauty, than live for bread.' 

You observe love is substituted for heauty in the 
most naive assumption that the one involves the 
other." 

After what has been said I may well let the idle 
statement pass unnoticed that Mr. Emerson found 
his beliefs barren, and under the leadership of this 
or that divine wished to be taken back into the 
church ; but let these extracts from letters written 
by him to friends, and, I believe, not elsewhere 



254 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

printed, speak to the point whether he belonged to 
the Church Universal or no. 

" Concord, July 3, 1841. 

" I am very much moved by the earnestness of 
your appeal, but very much humbled by it ; for in 
attributing to me that attainment and that rest 
which I well know are not mine it accuses my 
shortcomings. I am, like you, a seeker of the per- 
fect and admirable Good. My creed is very sim- 
ple, that Goodness is the only Reality, that to 
Goodness alone can we trust, to that we may trust 
all and always ; beautiful and blessed and blessing 
is it, even though it should seem to slay me. 

"Beyond this I have no knowledge, no intelli- 
gence of methods ; I know no steps, no degrees, no 
favorite means, no detached rules. Itself ^is gate 
and road and leader and march. Only trust it, be 
of it, be it, and it shall be well with us forever. It 
will be and govern in its own transcendent way, 
and not in ways that arithmetic and mortal expe- 
rience can measure. I can surely give no account 
of the origin and growth of my trust, but this only, 
that the trust accompanies the incoming of that 
which is trusted. Blessed be that ! Happy am I 
when I am a trust; unhappy and so far dead if 
it should ebb from me. If I, if all should deny 
it, there not the less would it be and prevail and 
create. 



THE OVERS OUL. 255 

" We are poor, but it is rich : as every wave crests 
itself with foam, so this can incarnate itself every- 
where with armies of ministers, inorganic, organic 
plant, brute, man, angel, to execute its will. What 
have we to do but to cry unto it All-Hail, Good 
Spirit ; it is enough for us that we take form for 
thy needs : Thou art in us ; Thou art us. Shall 
we not learn to look at our bodies with a religious 
joy, and empty every object of its meanness by 
seeing how it came to be ? 

" But the same Goodness in which we believe, or 
rather which always believes on itself, as soon as 
we cease to consider duties, and consider persons, 
becomes Love, imperious Love, that great Prophet 
and Poet, that Comforter, that Omnipotency in the 
heart. Its eye falls on some mortal form, but it 
rests not a moment there ; but, as every leaf rep- 
resents to us all vegetable nature, so love looks 
through that spotted, blighted form to the vast 
spiritual element of which it was created and 
which it represents. We demand of those we love 
that they shall be excellent in countenance, in 
speech, in behavior, in power, in will. They are 
not so ; we are grieved, but we were in the right to 
ask it. If they do not share the Deity that dic- 
tated to our thought this immense wish, they will 
quickly pass away, but the demand will not die, 
but will go on accumulating as the supply accumu- 
lates, and the virtues of the soul in the remotest 



256 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

ages will only begin to fulfil the first craving of our 
poor heart. 

" I count you happy that your soul suggests to 
you such affectionate and noble errands to other 
spirits as the wish to give them your happiness and 
your freedom. That the Good Heart, which is the 
heart of us all, may still enrich you with new and 
larger impulses of joy and power is the wish of 
your affectionate servant, 

"E. Waldo Emerson." 

" Concord, June 15, 1842. 
• •••••.«• 

" The wonderful spirit that streams through us, 
though in the prodigality of its flood it seems to 
stagnate in thousands of pools and ponds of dull 
customary life, never forgets itself, never pauses, 
but goes from greatness to greatness imperceptibly 
and in each individual uninterruptedly on, abol- 
ishing in the extent of the moment or thought all 
that we valued in the past ; and though it takes up 
the Past into to-day, it has found in it new values, 
and . uses what we slighted. 

" The past thus becomes as new as the present 
and is still to change by new classifications, so that 
we are ever running backward out of the present 
wisdom ; and thus nothing has an end, but every 
oldest fact and thought buds and blossoms and 
yields fruit in the garden of God." 



YOUTH OF THE SPIRIT. 257 

In a journal occurs a draft of a letter to an 
old friend, after her conversion to the Church of 
Rome, written much later than the preceding letters. 
He says : — 

" To me the difference of churches looks so friv- 
olous that I cannot easily give the preference that 
civility should to one or another. To old eyes how 
supremely unimportant the form under which we 
celebrate the justice, love and truth, the attributes 
of the deity and the soul ! " 

His own last days were serene and happy as 
should befall such a life and such belief. In 1864, 
almost at the time when he wrote Terminus, his 
journal says : — 

" Within I do not find wrinkles and used heart, 
but unspent youth." 

Long before, he had written : — 

" Old age, ... I see no need of it. Whilst we 
converse with what is above us we do not grow old, \ 
but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspir- 
ing, with religious eye looking upward, counts itself 
nothing and abandons itself to the instruction 
flowing in from all sides. But the man and woman 
of seventy assume to know all, throw up their hope, 
renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the neces- 
sary, and talk down to the young. ... Is it possi- 
ble a man should not grow old ? I will not answer 
for this crazy body. It seems a ship which carries 



\ 



258 EMERSON IN CONCORD. 

him through the waves of this world and whose 
timbers contract barnacles and dry-rot, and will not 
serve for a second course. But I refuse to admit 
this appeal to the old people we know as valid 
against a good hope. For do we know one who 
is an organ of the Holy Ghost ? " 

The following fragment from a journal when 
he was sixty years old was perhaps a fancy about 
the members of that favored company, the Satur- 
day Club, as there is an entry on the same page 
about Charles Sumner's election to the " Saturday- 
rians " : — 

" In that country, a peculiarity, that after sixty 
years a certain mist or dimness, a sort of autumnal 
haze settled on the figure, veiling especially all de- 
cays. Gradually, year by year, the outline became 
indistinct and the halo gayer and brighter. At 
last there was only left a sense of presence and the 
virtue of personality, as if Gyges never turned his 
ring again." 

While crossing the Atlantic for the last time 
homewards my father fulfilled his threescore and 
ten years, and his friend Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, 
a fellow-passenger, saluted him thus truly on that 
birthday morning : — 



SALUTATION. 259 

"TO R. W. EMERSON. 

"May 25, 1873: 

" Blest of the highest gods are they who die 

Ere youth is fled. For them, their mother Fate 
Clasping from happy earth to happier sky, 

Frees life, and joy, and love from dread of date. 

** But thee, revered of men, the gods have blest 

With fruitful years. And yet for thee, in sooth. 
They have reserved of all their gifts the best, — 
And thou, though full of days, shalt die in youth.' * 



3 



itaMMiM.^0i 



INDEX. 



Abbott, Judge Josiah G., 32. 

Abolition of slavery, 74-79. 

Abolitionists, 75, 175. 

Academy, French, 190. 

Action, value of to the scholar, 82, 
214, 215. 

Adams, Abel, 39, 120, 199. 

Adams, John, 101. 

Adams, John Quincy, 101. 

Adirondac Club, 157. 

jEolian Harp, 172. 

Agassiz, 104, 120, 145, 184. 

Age, no allovpance for, in conversation, 
174, 177. 

Age, the present, 226, 242, 246. 

Agricultural Society, Middlesex, ad- 
dress before, 136. 

" Agricultui-e in Massachusetts," 137. 

Alcott, Amos Bronson, 106-108, 120, 
127, 128, 165, 203. 

Alger, Rev. WilUam R., 236. 

Amelioration, 65, 130. 

America, 134. 

Ancestors, 2-4. 

Anecdotes of Old Concord, 17, 52, 53, 
67, 80, 96, 102, 139-142, 148, 150. 

Angelo, Michael, 163, 167. 

Animals, 127, 158, 159. 

" Anthology, The Monthly," 5. 

Anti-slavery meetings, 76, 78, 87, 88. 

Anti-slavery organization, 75. 

Apples, 117, 129-132. 

Approbated to preach, 33. 

Aristocracy, Natural,-lecture on, 85- 
87, 9:J. 

Arnold, Matthew, 176, 177. 

Art, 97, 98, 163, 167. 

Artillery Company, Ancient and Hon- 
orable, 7. 

Artillery, Concord, 103. 

Athenaeum, Concord, 90. 

Athenaeum library (Boston), 5, 50. 

Babies, 166. 

Bancroft, George, 30, 96. 
Bardic poetry, 229. 
Barnwell, Robert, 27. 
Bartlett, Dr. Josiah, 150. 
Bathing, 155, 156. 
Beaconsflsld. Lord, 189. 



Beauty, 64, 66, 118, 119, 163, 164, 172, 

238, 240, 245, 251, 253. 
Beauty, poem on, 172, 253. 
Bigelow's tavern, 94. 
Birds, 60, 128, 158. 
Bliss, Rev. Daniel, 3, 55. 
Bliss, Phebe, 3, 55. 
Bodily characteristics, 156, 163, 165, 

166. 
Books, 9, 25, 29-31, 36, 37, 42, 60, 65, 

109, 117, 118, 170, 174, 181, 216. 
Boston, 97 ; early recollections of, 12- 

15 ; residence in, 4-16, 19, 39-42. 
Boston mob, 88. 
Bradford, Dr. Gamaliel, 34. 
Bradford, George P., 43, 104, 106, 126, 

177. 
Bradford, Samuel, 11. 
Brahma, the poem, 162 229. 
Brown, John, of Ossawatomie, 87. 
Browning, Robert, 220, 229. 
Bulkeley, Elizabeth, 2. 
Bulkeley, Rev. Peter, 2, 104. 
Burial, 196. 

Burke, Edmund, 170, 227. 
Business ability, 125, 197-201. 
Byron, 173, 229. 

Cabot, James Elliot, 1, 104, 123, 184, 

188, 189, 195, 226. 
Cabot's memoir of Emerson, 1. 
Caesar, Julius, anecdote of, 152. 
" Ccesar's Woods," 18, 171. 
California, 157, 184. 
Cambridge, residence in, 23-31, 33. 
Campbell, 17, 221, 229. 
Canal-boat travelling, 178. 
Canterbury (Roxbury), Mass., 28. 
Capital punishment, 88. 
Card-playing, 168. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 37, 45, 187, 194, 197, 

198, 216. 
Celestial Love, a poem, 252. 
Channing, Rev. W. E., D. D., 34, 104. 
Channing, William EUery, 71, 104, 

115-118, 127, 141, 171. 
Channing, Rev. William H. , 220. 
Chardon St., Boston, residence in, 

39. 
Charity, 198, 201, 210, 211. 



262 



INDEX. 



Charleston, S. C, 34, 35. 
Cheerfulness, 47, 49, 108, 179, 193. 
Chelmsford Academy, 32. 
Cheney, John M. , 24. 
Chesapeake and Shannon, 12. 

Chicago, 142, 180, 185. 

Childhood, 7-17. 

Children, 1G6, 174. 

Church, First, in Boston, 4, 8, 34; 
Second, in Boston, 37^2, 50, 70 ; in 
Concord, 67-71, 106, 191, 196; in 
East Lexington, 67-68 ; in New Bed- 
ford, 36, 47, 48 ; Roman Catholic, 
257. 

Church Universal, 169, 241, 248, 251, 
254, 257. 

Church forms, 40, 41, 48, 248, 249. 

Church-going, 70-71, 169, 191. 

Church, hymn on the, 70. 

Church music, 69. 

Cid, Southey's Chronicle of the, 170. 

Civic duties, 65-67, 71, 72, 81-90, 142, 
146. 

Classics, 173, 181. 

Classmates, 24, 27, 29. 

Class-poem, 27. 

Clubs, Conventicle and Pythologian, 
24 ; Adirondac, 157 ; Saturday, 123, 
184,258. 

Coleridge, 36, 42, 54. 

College days, 20-27. 

Color and form, 98, 113, 116, 119, 
163. 

Commimities, 139, 203. 

Compensation, 31, 131, 140, 206, 229. 

Concord, Mass., ancestral ties to, 2, 
3,51-55; residence in, in childhood, 
16, 17 ; first public speech in, 17 ; 
visits in youth, 18, 19, 55; settles 
there in 1834, 51 ; buys house and 
lands there, 55, 58, 124, 127 ; gives 
oration on 200th anniversary of set- 
tlement of, 57, 148, 216; brings 
wife there, 57 ; first tovra office, 
67 ; relation to people there, 55-67, 
98, 99, 106, 136-138, 146, 149, 150, 
180, 185, 187. 
Concord, N. H., 36, 37, 39. 
Concord, river, 18, 112, 118, 232-234 ; 
meadows and woods and walks, 18, 
19, 58, 63, 103, 112, 115-118, 171, 
172, 1 92, 231-233, 249, 250 ; meeting- 
house, 68-71 ; library, 146 ; Lyceum, 
73-75, 120, 147, 190, 191 ; Fire As- 
sociation, 91 ; town meetings, 71-73, 
80-83 ; schools, 16, 142-146 ; events 
and celebrations, 17, 57, 93, 94, 103, 
104, 146, 148, 185, 187 ; militia com- 
panies, 103; Mill-dam, stores, tav- 
erns, and poor-house, 94, 99, 100, 
109, 141, 150 ; characters and anec- 
dotes, 102, 137-142, 149; advan- 
tages of life in, 51, 58, 99, 102-104, 
106, 112; celebration of his return 
to, 1873, 187. 



Concord Fight, 3, 57. 
Considferateness, 151, 152, 177, 202, 212. 
Conway, Rev. Moncure D., 46. 
Copan and Conantum, 171. 
"Cornwams,"the, 93. 
Courage, 85, 150, 168. 
Courtesy, 151-154, 174, 177, 209, 210. 
Court-house, 17, 186. 
Culture, 161. 

Dame School, 7. 
Dante, 92, 181. 
Darwin, 65. 
Davenport, Iowa, 179. 
" Days," the poem, 236. 
Deacon Reuben Brown (?), 70. 
Deacon Parkman, 141. 
Deacon White's store, 17. 
Death, 105, 168, 176, 240. 

" Mr. Emerson's, 195. 
Declamation, 15, 17, 19, 20, 27, 143. 
• 144,173. ' . . , 

Defenders, 149, 185. 
Dewey, Rev. Orville, 36, 47. 
Dial, the, 123, 133, 137, 227, 228. 
Dirge, the poem, 18. 
Discipline, family, 167-174. 
Discussion, inaptness for, 96, 212. 
Distance, eye for, 90. 
Divinity School address, 183, 226, 245. 
Divinity, study of, 31, 33. 
Dogs, 159. 

Downing's "Fruit Culture," 130. 
Drawing, 90, 163. 
Dress, 155. 

" Each and All," the poem, 252. 

Ear for music, 69, 164, 165, 172. 231. 

Eating and drinking, 152-155. 

Echo, 172. 

Education, 143-145, 173, J 74. 

Egypt, 187. 

Elocution, 39, 173. 

Eloquence, 72, 73. 

Emancipation, 76. 

Emblems, 95. 

Emerson, Charles Chauncey, 5, 16, 18, 
39, 49-51, 57, 67, 82, 104-106. 

Emerson, Edith (Forbes), 109, 185, 186. 

Emerson, Edward, of Newbury, 2. 

Emerson, Edward Bliss, 5, 16, 18, 26, 
33, 42, 49-52, 105. 

Emerson, Mrs. Ellen Louisa (Tucker), 
36-40, 104, 223. 

Emerson, Ellen Tucker, 109, 185-188. 

Emerson, Joseph, of Meudon, 2. 

Emerson, Joseph, of Maiden, 3. 

Emerson, Mrs. Lydia [Lidian] (Jack- 
son), 67, 170, 171, 185, 193, 195. 

Emerson, Mai-y Moody, 9, 16, 21, 52- 
54, 95, 104, 168, 217. 

Emerson, Mrs. Ruth (Haskins), 4, 8, 
21, 39, 51, 105, 123, 124, 128, 196. 

Emerson, Thomas, of Ipswich, 2. 

Emerson, Waldo, 129, 167. 



INDEX. 



263 



Emerson, William, of Concord, 3, 57. 
Emerson, William, of Harvard and 

Boston, 4-7. 
Emerson, William, of New York, 5, 20, 

28,49,50,91,105,215. 
Emerson, William Ralph, 185, 237. 
England, 122, 176, 217. 
England, visits to, 45, 85, 186. 
'* English Traits," 46. 
Erasmus, 173. 

Essays, made out of lectures, 64, 219. 
Europe, \isits to, 42, 85, 186. 
Everett, Edward, 30, 104. 
Everett, John, 15. 
Eye, 97, 98, 163, 164. 

Facts, symbolic use of, 64, 66, 100, 131. 

134, 163, 164, 238, 239, 249. 
Fanaticism necessary to work, 95. 
Farmers, 98, 135, 136, 147. 
Farmmg, 99, 126, 132-136. 
Fields, James T., 200. 
Financial conditions, 178, 184, 197- 

Fire Association, 91. 

Fire in Mr. Emerson's house, 149, 185. 

Fires in the woods, 91. 

Fitchburg railroad, 106, 135, 142, 178. 

Florence, 43, 44, 186. 

Florida, expedition to, 34. 

Flowers, 61, 157, 158, 171, 172. 

Flowers, Mrs. Emerson's, 66. 

Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, 181. 

Forbes, John Murray, 121-123, 157 

184,185. ' ' 

Forbes, Col. William H., 185, 200. 
Forces, 131, 136, 239, 251. 
Forest, 59-65, 116, 117, 164. 
Form and color, 98, 113, 116, 119, 163, 
Forms in worship, 40, 41, 48, 249. 
"Fortus," an early poem, 11. 
Fourier, 101. 
France, 44, 85, 186. 
Freedom, 75, 77, 87, 89, 176. 
Free speech, 85. 
Free trade, 83, 84. 
Friends, 104-124, 126-128, 157, 184. 

185,195,199,200,201. 
Frothingham, Rev. Nathaniel, 124. 
"Fruit Culture," Downing's book on. 

Fruit-lands Community, 203. 

Fruit-trees, GQ, 125, 129, 130. 

Fruit, "Van Mons' theory of ameliora- 
tion, 130, 131. 

Fugitive slave, 76, 77, 80. 

Fugitive Slave Act, 77. 

FuUer, Margaret, 104, 161, 220. 

Fumess, Rev. William H., D, D., 7. 
11,107,186,211. 



Games, 168. 

Gardening, 66, 79, 124-127, 129-136. 
Garrison, William Lloyd, 76, 104. 
Gifts, 128. 



Glasgow University rectorship, 189. 
God, 70, 176, 241, 248, 250, 251, 254, 

Goethe, 65. 

" Good-bye, Proud World," the poem, 

Good out of evil, 80, 82, 131, 145, 229. 

239,240,244,246. ' ' ' ' 
Goodwin, Rev. Hersey B., 106. 
Goodwin, the fisherman, 141. 
Gould, Master, B, A., 11. 
Grammar school, 10. 
Grandchildren, 166, 195. 
Greenough, Horatio, 44, 191. 
"Growth of the Mind," by Samson 

Reed, 37. 
Guests, 120, 153, 175. 

Hafiz, 231. 

Happiness, 49, 139-245, 246. 

Harrison campaign (1840), 94. 

Harvard, Mass., 4, 182. 

Harvard University (Cambridge. 

Mass.), 143, 146, 175, 183. 
Haskins, Rev. D. G., 48. 
Haskins, Ruth, 4. (See Mrs. Ruth 

Emerson.) 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 104, 108. 109. 
184. ' . . , 

Health, 43, 165, 106, 184, 185, 188, 

193-195, 197, 213, 224. 
Heat, 164, 166. 

Hedge, Rev. F. H., D. D., 237. 
Heroism, lecture on, 85. 
Hey wood, Dr. Abiel, 141. 
Higher law, 90. 
History, early reading, 15. 
Hoar, Elizabeth, 68, 104, 112, 119, 123 
Hoar, Judge E. R., 119, 157, 167, 

Hoar, Samuel, 50, 76, 104, 119. 
Hog-reeve, office of, 67. 
Holmes, Dr. O. W., 184. 
Hope, 2, 31, 47, 113, 197, 244, 246, 258. 
Horsemen, 98, 158. 
Hosmer, Edmund, 71, 80, 137. 
Hospitality, 154, 175, 202. 
Hospitality to ideas, 153, 174, 175, 202. 
206. ' ' > . . 

Hotels, 165, 178-180. 

House in Concord, purchase of, 55; 
additions to, 105 ; partial burning 
of, 149, 185 ; rebuilding of, 185, 201 ; 
return to, 187. 

Houses in Boston, 4-9, 19, 39. 

Humility, 81, 96, 98, 114, 143, 174, 180, 
187,212,219. ' ' ' . 

Humor, 156, 160-163, 182, 205. 

Hunt, Benjamin Peter, 32. 

Hunter, John, 65. 

Hymn at dedication of Concord mon- 
ument, 149. 

Hymn at ordination of Rev. Chandler 
Robbins at Second Church, 70. 

Hymn, "All before us lies the way," 



264 



INDEX. 



by Miss Clapp, wrongly attributed 
to Mr. Emerson, 237. 
Hymns, 39, 170. 

Idealism, 14. 

Illusions, 1G4, 249. 

Immortality, 62, 

Indirection, 176. 

Infantry Company, Concord Light, 

103. 
Inspiration, 214, 217, 226-228, 236, 

238-244. 
Intellect, Natural History of, course 

at Cambridge, 183. 
Ireland, Alexander, 46. 
Italy, 43, 44, 186. 

Jackson, Dr. Charles T., 101. 
Jackson, Miss Lydia, 48, 57. 
Journals, 63, 64, 190. 

Kansas, Free State conflict, 87. 
Keyes, John S., 185. 
Kingdom of Heaven, 139. 
KirMand, Rev. John Thornton, Pres- 
ident of Harvard University, 23. 
Kosciusko, 17. 
Kossuth, 87. 

Labor, 151. 

Laborer, 98, 136, 151. 

Lafayette, 104, 223. 

Lamarck, 65. 

Landor, 44. 

Land-owning, 126. 

Lanier, Sidney, 251-253. 

Latin authors and language, 173, 181. 

Latin School, Boston, 11. 

Laughter, 163. 

Law studies, 77, 78. 

"Leaves of Grass," by W. Whitman, 

228. 
Lectures in Concord, 73, 75, 147, 148, 

191 ; in England, 217 ; at Harvard 

University, 283. 
Lectures, writing of, 54, 218, 219. 
Lecturing journeys to the West, 146, 

105, 178-183, 185. 
Ledge, Walden, 58, 59, 171. 
"Letters and Social Aims," Mr. Cab- 
ot's help in preparing, 188, 189. 
Letters from young people, 175, 191. 
Letters of introduction, 45. 
Lexington, East (Mass.), preaching at, 

67, 68. 
Linnaeus, 66. 
Longfellow, 194. 
Lord's Supper, the, 40, 49. 
Love, 168, 252, 255. 
Love, The Celestial, a poem, 252. 
Lovejoy, his martyrdom, 85. 
Lowel], General Charles Russell, 175. 
Lowell, James Russell, 114, 157, 170. 
Lyceum, Concord, 73-75, 147, 148, 190, 

191. 



Lyceums, 48, 73-75, 178, 179, 182, 199, 

216,219. 
Lyell, 65. 

Malta 42. 

Manners, '98, 120, 138, 151, 152, 154, 

163, 168, 174, 177, 202. 
Manse, The Old (Concord), 3, 18, 51- 

57, 186. 
Marriage, 39, 57. 
Materialism, 88. 
Mathematics, 15, 23, 174, 198. 
Maxims, 10, 168. 
May-Day, 183, 232, 236. 
Meadows, Concord, 18, 58. 
Melody, 15. 
Merlin, 229. 
Metaphysics, 183. 
Metre (see Rhyme and Rhythm). 
.Military instinct, 91, 92. 
Military service, 91. 
Militia, 91-94, 103. 
Mill-dam (see Concord), 
Mind, The Universal, 63, 229, 234, 241, 

247, 249-251, 254, 256. 
Ministry in Boston, 37, 42. 
Ministry in East Lexington, 67, 68, 
Minneapolis, 181. 
Minot, George, 80, 137, 139. 
" Monotones," 202, 205, 207. 
Montaigne, 29. 
Moody, Rev. Samuel ("Father 

Moody "), 3. 
Moore, poetry of, 15, 229. 
Moral law, 80, 240, 241, 244, 247. 
Morning, 61, 245. 
Mountains, 41, 172, 177. 
Murat, Achille, 35. 
Murat, Joachim, king of Naples, 35, 

173. 
Music, 69, 99, 164, 165. 
Musical eyes, 164. 
Musketaquid (see Concord River). 
Muster, 92, 93. 
"My Garden," the poem, 58,59,65, 

232. 

Naples, 43. 

Napoleon, 91, 152, 166. 

Natural history, 65, 66, 249, 250. 

Natural History of the Intellect, lec- 
tures at Harvard University, 183. 

Nature, 49, 59-65, 112, 113, 163, 167, 
192, 224, 230, 232, 238, 240, 242, 243, 
247, 249, 251. 

Naushon, 121, 122. 

Navy, U. S., early poems in honor of, 
10, 12. 

Neighborhoods, 99, 139. 

Neighbors, 80, 136-141, 147, 149, 185, 
187. 

New Bedford, 47, 48. 

Newton, visits to, 31, 196. 

Newton, Isaac, 131. 

Nile, 187. 



I 



INDEX. 



265 



Noddle's Island fortifications, 12. 

North End people, 15-38. 

Norton, Charles Eliot, Professor, 184, 

258; his poem to Emerson on his 

seventieth birthday, 259. • 

Obedience, doctrine of, 47. 

Old age, 124, 183, 192, 193, 221, 257. 

Old North Bridge, 4, 149. 

Optimism, 2, 47, 88, 140, 145, 244-247, 

251. 
Oracles, 176. 
Oriental poetry, 231. 
Orpheus, 24S. 
Osiris, 187. 
Osman, Emerson's name for the ideal 

self, 101, 210, 226. 
Over soul, 214, 241, 246, 248-256. 
Owen, 65. 

"Pairing off," 81. 

Pan, 112, 232. 

Pantheism, 63, 251. 

Parables, 64, 205. 

Paris, 45, 186. 

Parks, John C, 26. 

Pastoral duties, 38. 

Peace of 1815, 17. 

Pears, 129-132. 

Peter's Field, 17, 171. 

Phi Beta Kappa Society, addresses 

and poems before the, 183, 223, 224, 

250. 
Philae, 187. 

Phillips, Wendell, 75, 76, 88, 104. ' 
Pine-trees, 58, 64, 65, 91, 127, 172, 192, 

196, 214. 
Playground, 145. 
Plutarch, 174. 

Plymouth (Mass.), 48, 57, 62. 
Poem, Class, 27, 222 ; Phi Beta Kappa, 
• 183, 223, 224. 
Poems, youthful, 11, 12, 18, 221-223 ; 

of middle life, 223-230 ; later, 173, 

230, 237 ; first prose rhapsodies for, 

232-236.- 
Poet, The, a poem, 224, 226, 239, 242, 

243. 
Poet, the oflBce and fortune of, 117, 

118, 223, 230, 238-244. 
Poetry, 60, 136, 151, 170, 172, 173, 221- 

247. 
Poetry, classic and conventional, 60, 

221, 222, 227 ; early love of, 15, 221 ; 

history of Emerson's progress in the 

art of, 221-237. 
Politics, 71-90, 94, 95. 
Pope, 221. 

Positive teaching, 170. 
Poverty, 16, 197. 
Prayer, 32, 40, 48. 
Prayers, essay on, 133. 
Preaching, Mr. Emerson's, 32-42, 46, 

67, 82. 



Preaching, 68-71. 
Proteus, 249. 

Quakers, religion of the, 47. 
Quotations from the Bible, 159, 160. 

Railroad travelling, 178-182. 
Rarey's horse-taming, 158. 
Reading, good, 39, 143. 
Real versus Spiritual, 163, 248. 
Reed, Samson, 101 ; his book on the 

" Growth of the Mind," 37. 
Reformers, treatment of, 153, 201- 

206, 209-212. 
Reformers, anecdotes of, 206, 210. 
Reforms, 204, 206 ; attitude towards, 

75, 78, 153-155, 161, 203, 204, 206. 
Religion, 46, 47, 64, 68, 170, 247-256. 
Rhetoric, 15. 
Rhyme and rhythm, 221, 222, 224, 

227-229, 231-234, 243. 
Rice, Reuben N., 90, 149, 180. 
Riches, 201, 211. 
Riding, 156, 157, 168. 
Ripley, Miss Elizabeth, 186. 
Ripley, Rev. Ezra, D. D., 16, 19, 34, 

49, 55, 106. 
Ripley, Rev. Samuel, 20, 33. 
Ripley, Mrs. Sarah Alden (Bradford), 

104, 106. 
River, Concord or Musketaquid (see 

Concord). 
Rivers, The Two, 232-234. 
Robbins, Rev. Cliaudler, 70. 
Rock Island, Illinois, 179. 
Roman Catholic Church, 257. 
Rome, 43, 44, 186. 
Roses and tulips, 66. 
Rotch. Miss Mary, 47. 
Rowing, 113, 118. 
Russian reformer, 209, 210. 
Russian student arrested for possess- 
ing Emerson's Essay on Self-Reli- 

ance, 191. 

Saadi, Said or Seyd, 71, 226, 253. 

Sabbath, 171. 

Sanborn, F. B., "Life of Thoreau," 
133. 

Saturday Club, 123, 184, 258. 

Scholar, The, address delivered be- 
fore the Washington and Jefferson 
Literary Societies of the University 
of Virginia, 190. 

Scholar, duties of, 82-84, 90, 175, 213 ; 
happiness of, 190 ; weaknesses of, 
161, 180. 

Scholars, Mr. Emerson's, 30-32. 

School-days in Boston, 7, 10-15 ; in 
Concord, 16-18; in Waltham, 20, 
22, 24. 

School-keeping in Boston, 28, in Cam- 
bridge, 33 ; in Chelmsford, 32. 

Schoolmates, 10, 11. 

Schools, Concord, 16, 142-145. 



266 



INDEX. 



Scott, 172, 173, 244. 

Sea-shore, The, a poem, 235. 

Sea voyages, 34, 42. 

Self-heal, 172. 

Self-reliance, 191, 250. 

Servants, 151, 152, 169. 

Seyd (see Saadi). 

Shattuck, Col. D., 96. 

Shepherd, William, 92. 

Shooting, 157. 

Shops (see Concord). 

Shrewdness, 125, 19G-201. 

Sicily, 43. 

Sickness, his early, 31-36, 223, 244; 
his last, 193-195 : attitude towards, 
212. 

Simplicity in poetry, 229. 

Sims, the fugitive, 80. 

Skating, 157. 

Slave, fugitive, 76, 77, 80; act con- 
cerning, 77. 

Slave-holder, 87, 89. 

Slavery, 34, 75-80, 83-85. 

Smoking, 155, 

Social Circle, 1, 146, 149, 190 ; Book 
of Biographies, 1, 24, 139, 149, 190. 

Society, 100. 

Society versus Solitude, 27, 168, 215, 
217. 

Soldiers, 91, 92, 93. 

South, visits to, 33, 34, 190. 

Southerners, 80. 

Sphinx, The, a poem, 227. 

Spiritual, true meaning of, 248. 

" Spiritualist " revelation, 142. 

St. Augustine, 34. 

Stage-coach, 96, 97, 120, 142. 

Staples, Samuel, 138. 

Stars, 113, 225, 239. 

Stevenson, Miss Hannah, 31. 

Stewart, Dugald, his philosophy, 31. 

Stow, Cyrus, 134. 

Study, Mr. Emerson's, 63, 158, 167. 

Success out of failure, 82. 

Svnnmer-house, 127, 128. 

Sumner, Charles, 80, 184, 258. 

Sunday, observance of, 169-171. 

Sunday-school, 67. 

Sunday walk, 171, 172. 

Superlative, 98, 219. 

Swedenborg, 37, 48, 101. 

Swimming, 157. 

Symbols, 40, 94, 163, 238, 239, 241. 

Taliessin, 229. 
Tariff, 83. 

Taverns, 94, 141, 150. 
Taj-lor, Rev. Edward, 71. 
Teamsters, their last struggle, 142. 
Tem.p«rance, 153-155, 206. 
Terminus, the poem, 183, 258. 
Thayer, James B., Professor, 185. 
Thoreau, Henry D., 71, 104, 106, 110- 
115, 126-128, 133, 191. 



Thoreau, John, 128. 

Thought, 214, 242, 250. 

Tobacco, 155. 

Total abstinence, 153, 154. 

Town meeting, 71-73, 80-83. 

Town offices, 67, 142, 146. 

Trade, 83, 84. 

Transcedental epoch, 153. 

Transcedental guests, 153, 206-210. 

Transcedental poetrj-, 217. 

TraveUing, 46, 156, 157, 178-182, 184, 

186, 187, 217, 218. 
Truant, 13. 

Truth, 241, 242, 252, 253. 
Truth, aspects of, 248. 
Tucker, Ellen Louisa, 36. 
Two Rivers, a poem, 232-234. 

University, Glasgow, 189. 

University, Harvard, degree of LL. D. , 
183 ; Overseer of, 143, 183 ; course 
of lectures on Philosophy at, 183, 
184. 

University of Virginia, 190. 

Uriel, the poem, 229, 244, 245. 

Van Mons' theory of amelioration of 

fruit, 130, 131. 
Voice, 165. 
Voting, 80, 81. 

Walden and Walden woods, 58, 157, 

171, 172, 193. 
Waldeinsamkeit, the poem, 232. 
Waldo, 129. 
Waldo, Rebecca, 2. 
Walking, 111, 126, 156, 166, 171, 172, 

191-193, 231. 
Walks (see Concord). 
Waltham school, 20-22, 24. 
War, ^, 89, 122, 144, 145. 
War of 1812, 17. 
Ware, Rev. Henry, 37-40. 
Webster, Daniel, 51, 78, 104, 223. 
Wesson's tavern, 94, 141. 
White Pond, 116, 118. 
Whitfield, 104. 
Whitman, Walt, 228. 
Wine, 24, 154. 
Wood-god, 59, 232. 
Woodland, 58, 127. 
Wood-notes, 64, 111, 118. 
Woods, 59-65, 79, 111, 116, 163, 164, 

192, 193, 232, 249. 
Wordsworth, 45, 172, 173, 224. 
Worship, 89, 249, 250, 254, 255. 
Writing, method of, 54, 63, 64, 213- 

237, 247, 248 ; condensation in, 64, 

214, 219-221 ; early, 20-24-27, 31. 
Writing-school, 13. 

Young people, interest in, 143, 145, 

147, 174-177. 
Youth, 177, 257. 



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